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turkina
Contributor
Contributor
‎12-11-2009 12:13 PM

Slow network performance on vSphere whitebox

I've recently built a vSphere 4 U1 whitebox at home to monkey around with. I've used the following hardware:

AMD Phenom 9150e CPU

4GB RAM

3ware 9650SE-12ML RAID card

  • 3 arrays, 2x80GB RAID 1 for ESX, 3x250GB RAID 5 VMFS, 5x1TB RAID 5 Storage

2x Intel Pro1000 GT NICs

Previously this box was running Debian Linux and VMware Server 2. Linux was running Samba and software RAID to share the 5x1TB drives and I could consistently get 40MB/s+ xfer rates to and from the server. I have now created a Win2k8 R2 VM in vSphere and am able to get, at best, 20MB/s. The server is a fresh install, not P2V'd. I'm using VMXNET 3 as the vNIC. Server is still plugged into same network drop point and same switch. Tried swapping network cables but no improvement.

No other VMs are running and the Service Console and VM Network port groups are sharing the same vSwitch. VI Client is closed on my workstation.

Any ideas on how to earn back some of that network performance?

Thanks

VI3 VCP

VCP3/4/5, VCAP5-DCA
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3 Replies
turkina
Contributor
Contributor
‎12-15-2009 12:44 PM

Thanks for the reply but that KB article wouldn't apply here.

I'm looking to get 40MB/s performance when copying to and from a vSphere VM to a physical workstation.

For example, I have a Windows 2008 R2 VM set up in vSphere. When I copy a file to it from my office PC I can't get better than 20MB/s even when no other VMs are turned on and the vSphere client is closed. When this same hardware was running Debian Linux I could routinely get over 40MB/s.

So the hardware hasn't changed, only the OS. The result is half the network speed.

Thanks

VI3 VCP

VCP3/4/5, VCAP5-DCA
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LucasAlbers
Expert
Expert
‎12-15-2009 01:29 PM

I misunderstood.

So you switched from vmware server 2.0 w debian as host to esxi 4.0.

network performance inside the host vm windows 2008r2 went from 40 mb/s to 20 mb/s.

Is your hardware on the hcl for vsphere?

In some situations it does not support the disk controller writeback cache settings, I don't think that is the case here.

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