Netxen 10G Ethernet VM in 1G

[dark76000]

Hello,

I installed vmware esx 3.5 with an NetXen 10G Ethernet card on an HP DL 3360 G5.

My card is detected on my esx with the good driver (unm_nic). The problem is when i installed a VM with Windows Server 2003, the card is detected in 1GB. I did host Updates and Virtual Machine Updates.

Excuse for my english but I'm french.

Thanks you for your help

[aguacero]

Did you install the vmware tools?

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[dark76000]

yes, I installed vmware tools and i updated with the Update Manager

[aguacero]

Verify that the VM is attached to the vswitch (e.g. vswitch1) that's matched with the Netxen 10G card as compared to the HP's imbeddedd 1GB nic (vswitch0) .

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[dark76000]

I verified and it's good.

Is there something to configure to enable the 10GB on the VM?

[RenaudL · Accepted solution]

The virtual nics of the guest OSs will always appear to be 1G nics.

Don't worry though, this doesn't influence the maximum speed you are able to reach at all: this is only an hint and in no way indicates the speed of the underlying ESX pnics plugged in the server.

[dark76000]

Are you sure because i tried a transfer with an oher server with the same card and i don't have a 10 GB transfer?

[dark76000]

i don't think to have a 10GB/s rate

[RenaudL]

Reaching the theoretical 10G line rate is currently very hard (even with a native OS). There are quite a few bottlenecks preventing the OS from achieving to generate such an amount of data:

• The CPU itself, which usually tops at 100% before reaching the maximal speed.

• The PCI bus (I think at least a PCI-Express 16x slot is needed to reach 10G).

• The management of the data being pushed to the wire (this is our bit, we're putting tremendous efforts into improving this part).

And the most common of all:

• The I/O accesses to fetch data from another medium (SAN / local SCSI, etc). Only a generic network benchmark (netperf/iperf) will give you a good idea of what your bandwidth is.

So it is unlikely you'll be able to reach the theoretical 10G limit, but you'll still get better performance than with a 1G nic. We're continuously improving our 10G support, so expect the speed only to go up once we fine-tune ESX.

If you have any questions/concerns, you can send me a private message and I'll be able to answer you in French.