Hello,
We are experiencing extremely slow writes to a FreeBSD 10.3 VM running on an ESXi server [6.0.0, 2494585]. Physical hardware is on the VMWare compatibility list (HPE ProLiant DL20 Gen9 Server) There is a physical RAID controller (P440) with 4GB of cache (enabled) and 3 SSD drives in a RAID 5 configuration.
BSD VM has 4GB of ram, 2CPUs, LSI Parallel controller, E1000 Nic and open-vm-tools is installed.
When we attempt to copy a file over the network to a BSD VM from a physical machine on the same network the throughput is somewhere around 20 MB/s, however within a few seconds it drops to zero for several seconds (7 – 15 ) and then picks back up and stays around 10 – 15 MB/s
There are several post on the internet identifying the problem when ZFS is used on NFS, however our storage is local VMFS5. https://calvin.me/slow-vmware-nfs-zfs-add-zil/
The I/O performance test on a BSD Guest
time dd if=/dev/zero of=/testfile.fle bs=1m count=2000
2000+0 records in
2000+0 records out
2097152000 bytes transferred in 1.592420 secs (1316959010 bytes/sec)
0.000u 0.957s 0:01.59 59.7% 25+171k 0+0io 0pf+0wJust to rule Virtualization out, we built another BSD system, but on the physical hardware. File transfer from a physical Windows system to a BSD machine is consistent at 35MB/s with 0 drops. (both systems have SSD drives)
We also have a Win 2012 Server Guest running on the same ESXi server. Hardware assigned to the Windows box is the almost identical to the BSD guest, however ISCSI controller is paravirtual and the nic is VMXNET 3
Coping the test file to a Win 2012 VM from a physical machine is always rock solid at 115MB/s.
Does anyone have any ideas what could be causing the delays / drops during the file copy on the BSD VM?
There is only 2 VMs on this ESXi Host and no resource allocation is configured. Iperf test between a physical Windows 7 and FreeBSD VM shows that the network is capable of transfers at 1GB/s
Any help is greatly appreciated.
Thank you
