Hello All,
I'm brand new here so if I didn't find this previously answered I do apologize ahead of time.
My issue is that I'm having speed issues with connecting a FreeNAS 9.2.0 box to my ESXi 5.5 box.
They are two separate boxes (actually 3, there are 2 FreeNAS boxes)
Each of them has over 16GB of RAM and is Server hardware, ECC memory, multiple NICS, Intel Xeon and AMD quad core processors some have dual socket motherboards for 8 processing cores.
I currently have the storage on a separate network port on each server and its own dedicated switch to keep all storage traffic separate from other network traffic (I do have a Cisco switch that supports VLAN's but I wanted to eliminate the possibility that I would make a switching mistake while I troubleshoot this)
When I copy a file from a computer to a virtual machine that has its storage as the network attached storage (currently NFS share from FreeNAS, I haved tried iSCSI and got same result) it gets horrible speed around 7MBps. When copying from one Windows PC to another on my home network I get around 90MBps on average, of course depending on the file. It also drops out if you watch the transfer in Task Manager. I will include a screen shot.
It seems that the issue is related to the write sync requirement of ESXi from what I have researched already and I tried turning off the ZFS write sync on the FreeNAS side and it seemed to help but not enough.
If anyone has any suggestions or wants me to include logging information or anything just let me know and I'll respond as quickly as possible. I appreciate any and all help.
Thanks!
Hi and Welcome to the communities,
FreeNAS and ESXi have long going history of performance which usually bounce back to FreeNAS or some settings from ESXi side which need to changed. [Depending upon your system like TSO, jumbo frames, physical switch et al]
Following few links might give you some idea:
Sync writes, or: Why is my ESXi NFS so slow, and why is iSCSI faster? | FreeNAS Community
Technical Musings: Speeding up FreeBSD's NFS on ZFS for ESX clients
Re: Best way to test performance FreeNas
Hope it helps,
zXi
I actually have seen those sites already but I did go back and re-read to see if I missed something. I tried disabling the sync writes on the ZFS datastore a while ago, and saw some improvement but not much at all, it still does the same thing where it transfers files in bursts. It also does this on iSCSI. Should I give up on using FreeNAS and use a different platform for my storage? Also should I setup Wireshark to watch the traffic to see if something is happening there? I don't believe its a network issue as if I put the NFS share on my regular network via port bindings and transfer a file from a Linux box to NFS it transfers very quickly at about 60 to 70MBps but via VMware virtual machine it suffers the terrible 6 or 7MBps.
VMware virtual machine it suffers the terrible 6 or 7MBps.
What is the adapter in the vm?
Also, instead of file transfer as baseline, can you perform a scp of a one Big file say [1G] to the VM and to the regular network? This should take out the Guest role in picture.
