Learning about NIOC in VMware and how to utilize it today. For those who aren’t sure what it is, it is similar to QoS on a switch, prioritizing different types of traffic. The main functions of NIOC are shares, reservation, and limit. With relative shares you can assign a value from 1-100 for a VM/Service and if you give one service 1 and another a 2, the second service would get double the bandwidth relatively. With reservation, you can reserve a certain amount of bandwidth, however for a single VM/Service you are limited to only 75% of your slowest adaptors bandwidth and that reserved bandwidth cannot be used at all. Then finally there’s limit, this prevents a certain VM or service from using more bandwidth then you allow it to. I hope this brief overview can help people learn a little about NIOC and apply it to their environments. Please feel free to leave a comment with any questions!