OK I have ESXi4 in a box (Athlon II 4200+, nvidia 61xx chipset (Asus M2NPV-v), SATA drives
vmnic0 - forcedeth - nvidia
Vmware management Interface 192.168.a.b/24
vmnic1 e1000e - Intel CT gigabit PCIe (esxcfg-module -s IntMode=1 - disable MSI-X as it prevents card from seeing a cable connected)
vmnic e1000 - Intel GT gigabit PCI
I have installed
Ubuntu 9.10 - no vmware tools 192.168.a.c/24
ClearOS (Centos 5.4 distrib Gateway Mode)
PROBLEM
The ClearOS acts as a router forwarding WAN traffic from eth0 to eth1, providing caching DNS etc.
The WAN connection is in this case an ADSL2+ 18/1.2 Mbps connection going via another hardware ADSL ModemRouter. The WAN connection is all on subnet 192.168.d.0
The WAN is physically connnected to vmnic1 - Only ClearOS has access to vmnic1 but it is just run as a switch with "flexible" network adapter under VM
The LAN is physically connected via Netgear Gigabit simple switch - I am using a WIndows 7 machine.
Basically the setup works fine when I have not installed vmware tools (including vmxnet). Once I install the tools and activate the vmxnet driver, the ClearOS system routes so that I am unable to access web pages or email, although bizarrely SSH works fine presumaby because of the low level f traffic.
Its not a CPU issue. All performance stats show <100MHz in use
The ClearOS box is able to route for the Ubuntu VM on the same machine, both on the same vmnic or another one.Running Firefox and Bittorrent on th ubuntu box (accessed via the Vmware console ) is fine. Note that all this traffic is via the same subnet and in fact via the forcedth driver.
If I switch the LAN interface between the vmnic0 (forcedeth) and vmnic2 (e1000) then the system works fine on vmnic, and not on vmnic2.
Clearly there is an interaction on vmxnet, e1000, CentOS rendering traffic so slow that the system is unusable, as vmxnet,focedeth,CentOS and pcnet32,e1000,CentOS both work.
Other combinations I have not tried are
a) swapping vmnic1/2 roles around to see if its unique to e1000 rather than e1000e
b) rebuilding the VM to used other than the "flecible" adapter settings
c) Other versions of ESXI other than 4.0
Cheers
Rajiv
Try turning off TCO on the VM's NIC that might help.
Sorry thats too brief for me to understand
TCO ??
and at what level (in VMware, in the GuestOS, VMware Command Line)
Cheers
Rajiv
Sorry I meant TSO/GSO/TX offloading and it is within the Guest VM
Results of ethtool -k on working forcedth
Offload parameters for eth0:
Cannot get device rx csum settings: Operation not supported
Cannot get device tx csum settings: Operation not supported
Cannot get device udp large send offload settings: Operation not supported
rx-checksumming: off
tx-checksumming: off
scatter-gather: on
tcp segmentation offload: on
udp fragmentation offload: off
generic segmentation offload: off
generic-receive-offload: off
I then followed a different post suggesting that if one adds the e1000 as an e1000 rather than flexible in the vmconfiguration it works. Lo and behold it works, new ethtool results for thee1000 card apologies for not having the e1000 card as a vmxnet results
Cannot get device udp large send offload settings: Operation not supported
rx-checksumming: on
tx-checksumming: on
scatter-gather: on
tcp segmentation offload: on
udp fragmentation offload: off
generic segmentation offload: off
generic-receive-offload: off
So it would seem that while offloading may be the root cause, its some driver issue as forcing the VM to use the e1000 driver (for an e1000) card rather than vmxnet seems to fix the issue.
This is a great relief to me as for low end VM boxes, a £20 ethernet card is much more appropriate, although I suppose the £60 server cards are not so excessive.
Cheers
Rajiv