Sunday, September 23, 2012
In vSphere 5.0 vmware comes up with
two new Networking Capabilities in virtual Distributed Switch.The first
improves the network administrator’s ability to monitor and troubleshoot
virtual infrastructure traffic by introducing features such as
·
NetFlow
·
Port mirror
The type focuses on enhancements to
the network I/O control (N I OC) capability first released in vSphere
4.1. The enhancements to NIOC enable customers to provide end-to-end
quality of service (QoS) through allocating 1/0 shares for user-defined traffic
types as well as tagging packets for prioritization by external
network infrastructure.
·
User-defined resource pool
·
vSphere replication traffic
type
·
IEEE 802lp tagging
Network Monitoring and
Troubleshooting
Network administrators
require more control on the traffic flowing between virtual infrastructure
& from virtual infrastructure to physical infrastructure. The new
functionality in vSphere 5.0 Distributed Switch to monitor
& troubleshoot networking issues provides more visibility on the traffic.
Net Flow :
NetFlow
v5 is a networking protocol is most common version and is supported by most of
the network devices. NetFlow collects IP traffic information and sends them to
a collector for flow analysis. With NetFlow capability on a vDS with NetFlow
collector tool helps in application monitoring and capacity planning. This also
help administrator to ensure that I/O resources are utilized properly by
different applications as per there needs. NetFlow on vDS can be enabled
at
·
Port Group Level
·
Individual Port Level
·
Uplink Level
Port Mirror :
The Port
Mirroring configured on vDS provides ability to network administrator in
debugging network issues in a Virtual Infrastructure. Port Mirroring in vSphere can also be referred to as
Switch Port Analyzer on Cisco Switches. Port Mirroring sens a copy of network
packets seen on a switch port to a network monitoring device connected to
another switch port. Once Port Mirroring is configured with a destination vDS
copies packets to the destination (the traffic destination can be any VM,
vmknic or uplink port).
Network Management and
Configuration :
These days different vendors comes
up with different type of Virtual & Physical networking devices and the
data center environment is getting complex to manage and configure because
of heterogeneous networking devices from different vendors.
vSphere 5.0 comes up with supports
for IEEE 802.1AB Standard – based Link Layer Discovery Protocol (LLDP) for
management & configuration of heterogeneous networking devices in data
center.
LLDP ( Link Layer Discovery Protocol
) :
LLDP is a vendor-neutral Link Layer
protocol in the Internet Protocol Suite used by network devices for advertising
their identity, capabilities, and neighbors on a IEEE 802 local area network
LLDP performs functions similar to
several proprietary protocols, such as Cisco Discovery Protocol, Extreme
Discovery Protocol from Extreme Networks, Nortel Discovery Protocol (also known
as SONMP), and Microsoft’s Link Layer Topology Discovery (LLTD).
Virtual infrastructure administrator
can enable this feature on vDS by selecting LLDP discovery protocol with
following options
·
Listen
·
Advertise
·
Both
Network Traffic Management
As more and more
critical applications are being run virtualized environment its
become important to manage the traffic flowing though a physical network
interface to avoid Low – Priority traffic consuming all the network resources.
In VMware vSphere 5, NIOC (Network
Input / Output Control) supports traffic management for following type of
traffics
·
Management traffic
·
iSCSI traffic
·
Virtual Machine traffic
·
NFS traffci
·
Fault Tolerant traffic
·
VMware vMotion traffic
·
User – defined traffic
·
vSphere replication traffic
Through NIOC a network administrator
can allocate I/O shares and limits to different type of traffic types.
Administrators can now create user defined traffic types and allocate
shares and limits to them.
vSphere Replication Traffic is a new system traffic. vSphere replication traffic
once configured on vDS under resource allocation with configured shares &
Limits parameter helps to provide required network resources to the
replication process.
User – Defined Network Resource Pools
User defined network resource pools
provide an ability to add new traffic types that are used for I/O Scheduling.
User Defined Network resource pools can be defined at vDS level. Once a new
network resource pool is defined with shares and limits, the resource pool can
be associated with a port group. Associating Network resource pool to a port
group enables to allocate I/O resources to a group of virtual machines or
workloads.
IEEE 8.02.1P Tagging
Tagging network packets with IEEE
802.1P BIT for prioritization provide capability to guarantee I/O resources to
the traffic generated from business critical applications & helps in
providing QoS to the business critical applications. IEEE 802.1P is a
3BIT field which differentiate packets into seven different traffic
classes.
It is not sufficient to provide I/O
resources just at host level for a business critical application unless it is
not planned to provide end – to – end QoS. Once configured on vDS switch
network administrator can edid the QoS priority tag field by choosing any
number from 1 – 7
