Virtual NIC Performance

ToddMuirhead — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 15:54:00 GMT

During our regular TechTuesday webchat, a question came up about virtual NIC performance. The topic this week was Running Enterprise Apps on VMware, and one aspect of that is performance. Hywel, who has a successful SQL Server deployment on ESX, asked - why is he only getting 250 mb/s of throughput? I found a VMware blog post and a whitepaper that indicate it is possible to get much higher. Of course in real-world use through-put will be lower, but I would think that you could top 250 mb/s. I believe that the key to getting the best performance form a virtual NIC in VMware is to install the VMtools and use the VMxnet NIC.

Todd

Is it Cool to Use Virtualization?

ToddMuirhead — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 20:24:00 GMT

These days, it seems like everybody is at least looking at using VMware. It's the cool thing to do. Clearly.

But what about when you run something like Exchange or SQL Server or Oracle? It seems that almost everybody is cool with virtualization, until you start talking about stuff like this. Then there is a pause. Some decide to push forward, others decide to wait, still others may declare that they would never do it!

There are lots of issues to consider including support, performance, backup, disaster recovery, and even non-technical things like organizational structure and management support. So the answer for everybody isn't the same. The next TechTuesday chat is going to have this as it's discussion point - Running enterprise apps virtualized - to let everybody learn from each other.

Todd

Virtualization Frontier

Virtual NIC Performance

Is it Cool to Use Virtualization?