Virtualization Essentials, 2nd Edition

Chapter 10Managing Networking for a Virtual Machine

Networking, like the circulatory system in your body, is the transport mechanism for moving vital supplies. While blood carries nutrients to the organs, computer networks traffic in information, which is just as crucial to the health and well-being of the applications in a data center. In a virtual environment, networking is a critical component of the architecture, ensuring that data arrives in a timely fashion to all of the virtual machines on a host. Much like storage I/O, network I/O is subject to the same bandwidth issues and constraints that can occur in a physical network environment. Because networks also carry storage traffic, they need to be sized, implemented, and managed properly ...