virtualized router performance under vsphere 6.5

[Gregtrea]

I decided to test vyos and opnsense under vsphere 6.5. I have a 1 gig lan and wan network setup and have PCs installed with iperf. bare metal performance for vyos is approx 900Mb/s, 700Mb/s for Opnsense. This is testing from a PC on the lan to a PC on the wan. Also if I run iperf on the appliances.

When i run both of these routers under vsphere 6.5 I am seeing iperf3 throughput of 70Mb/s PC lan to PC wan and reversed.

When I run iperf as a client from the appliance to a PCI get 600Mb/s however if I setup iperf as a server on the appliance and I see the 70Mb/s that wan to lan sees. So it seems like there is an issue with packets coming into the appliance but not leaving the appliance. Anyone have incite into this? How do I troubleshoot it? CPU util doesn't seem high from the appliance perspective, running around 15%. Plenty of memory.

Thanks for any suggestions.

[Gregtrea]

I have a theory on this but not sure how to fix it. Maybe someone has a suggestion. I did some tests while running the router bare-metal. I have a wireless adapter and tested bridging the wireless and wired networks. When I did the bridge performance dropped. I suspect the performance issues in this case are due to bridging the virtual network with with physical. There must be something the routers do that is sensitive to bridging. My question to any network experts what parameters should I look at and start tuning to help this situation.. Thanks in advance.

[Gregtrea · Accepted solution]

I solved the issue. Turns out the system at the BIOS level was messed up. I did tests with another system and the throughput was great. I went back to bare-metal on the test system and found the performance had degraded to about the virtualized levels. I decided to re-set the BIOS back to defaults. When I did the throughput shot up. I now get about 325Mb/s virtualized. Well within my operating needs, Live and learn I guess..