Month: October 2018

I am joining VMware!

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I am incredibly excited to announce that I will be joining VMware! Even more thrilled that I will be a member of the Cloud Platform Business Unit, in the R&D organization, as a Technical Marketing Architect.

Very grateful for the opportunity to be part of a team full of all-stars! My main focus will be my longtime love; VMware vSphere. And everything that comes with it. There is a lot going on with vSphere; version 6.7 U1 is released, we are moving towards the next-gen performance enhancements like PMEM and vRDMA, let alone new (hardware based) security improvements and the recently announced ESXi on ARM support. The list goes on and on…

It all starts with VMware vSphere!!

I thought a lot about joining VMware and kept an eye out for the right opportunity. Even though I was having a good time working as a freelance IT architect with fun projects, the time was right for a new challenge. It all just worked out. Perfect timing.

A big shout-out to all the people who pushed for me, you know who you are! A special thank-you goes out to Emad (Younis) and my fellow Dutchies Frank (Denneman) and Duncan (Epping). Thanks for recommending me. Can’t wait to get started at the end of this November!

See you at VMworld in Barcelona next week!

 

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vSphere Networking : Bandwidth Reservations

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To enforce bandwidth availability, it is possible to reserve a portion of the available uplink bandwidth using Network I/O Control (NIOC). It may be necessary to configure bandwidth reservations to meet business requirements with regards to network resources availability. In the system traffic overview, under the resource allocation option in the Distributed vSwitch settings, you can configure reservations. Reservations are set per system traffic type or per VM.

Strongly depending on your IT architecture, it could make sense to reserve bandwidth for specific business critical workload, vSAN network or IP storage network backend. However, be aware that network bandwidth allocated in a reservation cannot be consumed by other network traffic types. Even when a reservation is not used to the fullest, NIOC does not redistribute the capacity to the bandwidth pool that is accessible to different network traffic types or network resource pools.

Since you cannot overcommit bandwidth reservations by default, it means you should be careful when applying reservations to ensure no bandwidth is gone to waste. Thoroughly think through the minimal amount of reservation that you are required to guarantee for network traffic types.

For NIOC to be able to guarantee bandwidth for all system traffic types, you can only reserve up to 75% of the bandwidth relative to the minimum link speed of the uplink interfaces.

When configuring a reservation, it guarantees network bandwidth for that network traffic type or VM. It is the minimum amount of bandwidth that is accessible. Unlike limits, a network resource can burst beyond the configured value for its bandwidth reservation, as it doesn’t state a maximum consumable amount of bandwidth.

You cannot exceed the value of the maximum reservation allowed. It will always keep aside 25% bandwidth per physical uplink to ensure the basic ESXi network necessities like Management traffic. As seen in the screenshot above, a 10GbE network adapter can only be configured with reservations up to 7.5 Gbit/s.

Bandwidth Reservation Example

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