Deployment Guide

8 Network Partition (NPAR) Technology and VMware Virtual Switch comparison using QLogic BCM57800 | version 1.0
3 VMware’s VSS with traffic shaping
VMware’s VSS traffic shaping is allowed on outbound traffic from a VM, VMkernel port, or VSS port group.
The VMware vSphere client labels this “ingress/RX traffic” since it refers to data being transmitted to the VSS
from virtual devices. VSS traffic shaping includes three configurable settings per port group.
 Average Bandwidth (Kbps) – sets an upper limit on how much data the port can transmit.
 Peak Bandwidth (Kbps) – specified in Kbits/sec, allows the port to exceed the upper limit set by the
“Average Bandwidth” field up to the value set in the “Burst Size” field.
 Burst Size (KB) –ensures that the “Peak Bandwidth” values do not create unnecessary congestion.
The VSS 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.
Figure 3 shows a graphical representation of the relationship between average bandwidth, peak bandwidth
and burst size traffic shaping fields.
Average Bandwidth, Peak Bandwidth, and Burst Size traffic shaping fields