The configuration of NetIOC has been hugely simplified with the introduction of reservations. However, shares also play a very critical role in allocating unreserved bandwidth among the contenders based on the share values.

We will try to understand how shares work by way of an example.

For instance, the default share value configuration of medium (50) for the traffic types vMotion, management, and vSphere replication assumes the following:

• All three traffic types have to be configured to use an uplink that has a bandwidth of 10 Gbps
• Since each of the traffic types has a share value of 50, the cumulative share value for all three traffic types is 150 on the uplink
• During contention, each of the traffic types will get (50/150) *100 = 33% of the total bandwidth
• That translates to 33% of 5,000 Mbps, which is approximately 1.6 Gbps for each traffic type