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malaysiavm
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Expert

Slow Performance with 10 Gb CNA card on vSphere 4

anyone here test the nexus 5000 with 10Gb CNA card on ESX 4 with the virtual machine? I got a very slow performance and yet to sort out until now with my POC and need some advice here. We use the VMXNET3 which show up as 10Gb connection in the virtual machine, but the bandwidth utilization could not even reach 1Gbps from the virtual machine when we do file copy and network speed test.

When I tried the Vmotion on the 10Gbps connection, I am able to utilize up to 1.5Gbps

Any idea or suggestion could help on this?

Craig

vExpert 2009

Malaysia VMware Communities -

Craig vExpert 2009 & 2010 Netapp NCIE, NCDA 8.0.1 Malaysia VMware Communities - http://www.malaysiavm.com
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malaysiavm
Expert
Expert

You may refer to for more information.

Regards,

Superman

Malaysia VMware Communities - http://www.malaysiavm.com

Craig vExpert 2009 & 2010 Netapp NCIE, NCDA 8.0.1 Malaysia VMware Communities - http://www.malaysiavm.com
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benma
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

Hey buddy,

the QLE8042 is not on the HCL for ESX4.

There is a driver for 3.5U2

If you are brave you can try to install the module on a ESX4 testserver(!)

Have you tried your tests with the normal mtu?

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malaysiavm
Expert
Expert

vSphere was auto detect as ISP8432 4Gb FCoE PCI Express HBA & Intel 82598EB 10 Gigabit.

MTU 1500 have the similar result.

Both CNA connected to PCIe 8x slot.

Superman

Malaysia VMware Communities - http://www.malaysiavm.com

Craig vExpert 2009 & 2010 Netapp NCIE, NCDA 8.0.1 Malaysia VMware Communities - http://www.malaysiavm.com
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admin
Immortal
Immortal

The socket buffer sizes you are using in the VM are quite small.

Could you try with larger socket buffer sizes:

netperf (or netclient) -l 60 -t TCP_STREAM -H <IP> -- -m 8K -s 64K -S 64K

-m is for message size

-s is for local socket buffer size : You should use larger socket buffers for high throughput networks (64K+ is better)

-S is for remote socket buffer size

If this helps, you could try modifying the default windows socket buffer size (MSFT provides some kb articles to achieve this.). This should help your file transfer apps.

Are you using Server2003 SP2. Because prior to that, Windows Server 2003 does not support TSO. TSO improves transmit performance (copying out of a VM) quite a bit. You could also try different VMs (64 bit version on Server 2003 SP2, Linux etc...) to see if your VM configuration is an issue.

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jasoncllsystems
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Thanks.

Yes I did that as suggested by VMware White Paper.

You may refer to my latest updated @ http://malaysiavm.com/blog/cisco-nexus-5000-poc/

Regards,

Jas aka Superman

MALAYSIA VMware Communities

http://www.malaysiavm.com

'If you found this or any other answer useful please consider allocating points for helpful or correct answers ***

http://www.malaysiavm.com
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