New in vSphere 5.0 Networking

                     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