Random Network slowdowns, Netware 6.5 SP7, ESX 3.5, Dell Poweredge 2900

[dsadaka]

Greetings all,

I have a client with a Dell Poweredge 2900 Dual Quad-Core XEON with 18GB RAM.

He has two Netware 6.5 SP7 guests as well as almost a dozen Windows XP guests. A few times a week, the network fo 65 users will experience a slowdown for an extended period. The network traffic on vminc0, which connects to the virtual switch that supports the netware servers, jumps from an average of 7KB/s to 30KB/s. (as reported by VMware Infrastructure Client). The XP guests are on another virtual nic and switch.

I have purused through the logs, gathered all installed modules and versions, reviewed NTP and SLP setups but cannot find any glaring causes. I am new to VMWare hosted Netware, though, so I may not know where to look.

Any ideas?

TIA,

Dan

[bpenris]

What kind of virtual NIC are you using and are the clients and server in the same VLAN?

[dsadaka]

The virtual NIC driver is CNEAMD.LAN ver 1.39

The physical NIC is Broadcom. All clients and servers are on same LAN (no VLANs in use).

I've also noticed several of the following messages in the vmkernel log:

VSCSI: 2803: Reset request on handle 8323 (0 outstanding commands)

VSCSI: 3019: Resetting handle 8323

VSCSI: 2871: Completing reset on handle 8323 (0 outstanding commands)

The SCSI controller is a PERC 5/i

TIA,

Dan