Network consolidation for virtualized servers

A computer-implemented method for consolidating virtualized server kernel and virtual networks in a data center, comprising:

• defining a plurality of Classes of Service (CoS) for network traffic, including, at least a first class for virtualized server management traffic and a second class for inter-host virtual machine migration traffic;
• defining a minimum bandwidth allocation to guarantee at least a fraction of bandwidth provided by a physical Ethernet network to the virtualized server management traffic and to the inter-host virtual machine migration traffic;
• adding a CoS tag to data frames originating from a computing system executing a hypervisor and one or more virtual machines, wherein each CoS tag identifies the respective data frame as belonging to one of the defined plurality of Classes of Service;
• and
• scheduling, by a physical network interface device on the computing system, each data frame for transport on the physical Ethernet network according to the respective CoS tag and the minimum bandwidth allocation.

A non-transitory computer-readable storage medium containing a virtual machine hypervisor and a virtual switch which, when executed on a processor, performs an operation for consolidating virtual machine networks in a data center, the operation comprising:

• defining a plurality of classes of service (CoS) for network traffic, including, at least a first class for virtualized server management traffic and a second class for inter-host virtual machine migration traffic;
• defining a minimum bandwidth allocation to guarantee at least a fraction of bandwidth provided by a physical Ethernet network to the virtualized server management traffic and to the inter-host virtual machine migration traffic;
• adding a CoS tag to data frames originating from a computing system executing the virtual machine hypervisor and one or more virtual machines, wherein each CoS tag identifies the respective data frame as belonging to one of the defined plurality of classes of service;
• and
• transmitting the tagged data frames to a physical network interface device on the computing system, wherein the physical network interface device is configured to schedule each data frame for transport on the physical Ethernet network according to the respective CoS tag and the minimum bandwidth allocation.