What happens in term of performance if I didn't install VMware tools on linux with NIC defined as VXNET3

[ekhmahg]

Hi Experts,

I would like to understand the following:

currently I have a server with 10G interfaces (ESXi 5.5 u1), and I have installed SUSE linux as a virtual machine with VXNET3 NIC adapter, but I don't want to install VMware tools. According to the below article, VMtools are needed for VXNET3

VMware KB: Choosing a network adapter for your virtual machine

So my question is: what will happen to the network performance on this machine? (I have seen that it basically works but not sure of the performance).

Another question: in case we have a virtual machine but we don't want to install VMtools on it, what is the recommended NIC adaptor for this virtual machine?

Thanks,

ekhmahg

[JarryG]

What happens? Nothing. I have a few linux-VMs with vxnet3 (without VMware-tools) and I do not have any problem. Driver for vxnet3 is in main kernel tree since 2.6.32. You do not need VMware-tools to use it. Performance-wise, I think it is not limited in any way. VM-to-VM speed is full...

[ekhmahg]

yeah, I know it works. I just chose the wrong words to describe the question.

we have critical application that is affected by the network performance. we don't want to install the tools for the time being to not affect the performance and beside that some of the libraries needed by the tools were already stripped.

so my question is, what is the performance impact of not installing the VMtools when using VXNIC?

the second question: if we don't want to install VMtools at all, what is the recommended best performing NIC adaptor?

Thanks,

ekhmahg

[MKguy · Accepted solution]

so my question is, what is the performance impact of not installing the VMtools when using VXNIC?

None. Even if you did install the VMware Tools, your OS would still use the kernel provided vmxnet3 module unless you force it during the VMware Tools installation (--clobber-kernel-modules=vmxnet3).

Overwriting the OS provided module is not recommended and besides if you update your kernel regularly, you will probably have a newer or at least the same module version as provided by the VMware Tools (unless you always keep bleeding edge with your ESXi updates).

the second question: if we don't want to install VMtools at all, what is the recommended best performing NIC adaptor?

vmxnet3. As mentioned you don't need to install the VMware Tools since the kernel module is provided by every modern Linux already.