Deployment Guide

11 Network Partition (NPAR) Technology and VMware Virtual Switch comparison using QLogic BCM57800 | version 1.0
4 VMware VDS with traffic shaping
VMs, VMkernel ports and VDS port groups support VMware VDS traffic shaping on outbound and inbound
traffic. VMware vSphere calls this “ingress or egress” traffic since it refers to the fact that data is being
transmitted to the VDS from virtual devices or from the VDS to virtual devices. Figure 5 shows a graphical
view of VMware vSphere’s “ingress and egress” traffic shaping model:
VMware egress and ingress traffic shaping view
Each dvportgroup includes the following three, configurable VDS traffic shaping settings:
 Average Bandwidth – specified in Kbits/sec, sets an upper limit on how much data the port can
transmit.
 Peak Bandwidth – specified in Kbits/sec, allows the port to exceed the upper limit set by the
“Average Bandwidth” field up to the value of “Burst Size.”
 Burst Size – specified in Kbytes ensures that the “Peak Bandwidth” values do not create
unnecessary congestion.
The VDS traffic shaping “Average Bandwidth,” “Peak Bandwidth” and “Burst Size” fields allow administrators
to set limits in increments of 100Mbps for a 10GbE NIC. This 100Mbps granularity allows bandwidth
adjustments for production environments to better service mission-critical application network I/O needs.