Bug Life: vSphere 6.0 Network I/O Control & Custom Network Resource Pools

In a previous post How to configure Network I/O Control (NIOC) for Nutanix (or any IP Storage) I showed just how easy configuring NIOC is back in the vSphere 5.x days.

In was based around the concepts of Shares and Limits, of which I have always recommended shares which enable fairness while allowing traffic to burst if/when required. NIOC v2 was a Simple, and effective solution for sure.

Enter NIOC V3 in vSphere 6.0.

Once you upgrade to NIOC v3 you can no longer use the vSphere C# client and NIOC also now has the concept of bandwidth reservations as shown below:

NIOCoverview

I am not really a fan of reservations in NIOC or for CPU (memory is good though) and in fact I’ll go as far as to say NIOC was great in vSphere 5.x and I don’t think it needed any changes.

However with vSphere 6.0 Release 2494585 when attempting to create a custom network resource pool under the “Resource Allocation” menu by using the “+” icon (as shown below) you may experience issues.

As shown below, before even pressing the “+” icon to create a network resource pool, the Yellow warning box tells us we need to configure a bandwidth reservation for virtual machine system traffic first.

issue1

So my first though was, Ok, I can do this, but why? I prefer using Shares as opposed to Limits or reservations because I want traffic to be able to burst when required and for no bandwidth to be wasted if certain traffic types are not using it.

In any case, I followed the link in the warning and went to set a minimal reservation of 10Mbit/s for Virtual machine traffic as shown below.

Pix3

When pressing “Ok” I was greeted with the below error saying the “Resource settings are invalid”. As shown below I also tried higher reservations without success.

Pix2

I spoke to a colleague and had them try the same in a different environment and they also experienced the same issue.

I have currently got a call open with VMware Support. They have acknowledge this is an issue and is being investigated. I will post updates as I hear from them so stay tuned.

6 thoughts on “Bug Life: vSphere 6.0 Network I/O Control & Custom Network Resource Pools

  1. Pingback: Newsletter: October 17, 2015 | Notes from MWhite

  2. Josh, did you ever got an update back on this as I’m encountering the same issue and cannot see anything further online about any one else encountering this?

    • Just partial deprecation of capabilities such as what is described in this post. NIOC will remain, its just NIOC v3 is just worse than v2.