Mastering VMware vSphere 6.7 - Second Edition

Network metrics

The network is usually the latest bottleneck for your virtual machines, except in the case of VMs with massive network traffic or when networks are shared between VM traffic and other types of traffic (such as IP storage, but also vMotion or Fault Tolerance (FT) traffic).

Depending on the Network Interface Card (NIC) types, you may have two different but common situations for the VM traffic—dedicated NIC ports (typically for 1 Gbps ports where you may have several available ports) or shared ports (typically for 10 or more Gbps ports, where the number of ports is usually limited). Networking will be discussed in depth in Chapter 7, Managing Networking Resources.

For the network, throughput is usually the common metric used ...