VMware Performance and Capacity Management - Second Edition

Network

From the point of view of performance and capacity management, network has different fundamental characteristics than compute or storage. The key differences are summarized in the following table:

Compute or storage	Network
A relatively high amount of resources available to the VM	A low amount of resources available
Granular resource allocation at the VM level	Coarse allocation
Single-purpose hardware	Multi-purpose hardware
A node	An interconnect

Let's understand these differences in more detail, starting from the first one:

At the end of the day, the net resources available to the VMs is what we care about. What the ESXi and IaaS platform use is considered an overhead.

An ESXi host has a fixed specification (for example, two CPUs, ...