User-defined network resource pools in vSphere 5.0 provide an ability to add new traffic types beyond the standard system traffic types that are used for I/O scheduling. This video shows an example of a user-defined resource pool with shares, limits and IEEE 802.1p tag parameters. When customers are deploying critical applications on virtual infrastructure, they can utilize this advanced feature to reserve I/O resources for the important, business-critical application traffic and provide SLA guarantees. Service providers who are deploying public clouds and serving multiple tenants can now define and provision I/O resources per tenant, based on each tenant’s need.

The new resource pools can be defined at the Distributed Switch level by selecting the resource allocation tab and clicking on new network resource pools. After a new network resource pool is defined with shares and limits parameters, that resource pool can be associated with a port group. This association of a network resource pool with a port group enables customers to allocate I/O resources to a group of virtual machines or workloads.