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fox15rider
Contributor
Contributor

Openfiler on ESXi Experiencing Network Performance

I have a custom build server running ESXI with Openfiler loaded virtually onto the machine. I am experiencing very slow network traffic performance. I did see an increase in performance when I plugged in the second network card and configured it. I still am just above 100mbs when I should be at 1000mbs on each card.

With one card I recieved a max speed of 6000KBps or 46Megabits ps this is not even close to the 1000 mbps I should get.

With both nics configured for VM and assigned to the Vswitch I recieved a max speed of 18885KBps or 147Mbps.. this is a still a long ways from the 1Gbps I should get.

Here is my setup.

ESXI 3i version 3.5 build 123629

Guest os of Openfiler 2.3

this is an older Supermicro mother board.

Xeon 3.4 dual core

4 Gigs of memory

Dual Gigabit NICs (ESXi sees both NICs as full duplex Gigabit and is using the e1000 driver)

Datastore1 sites on a Dell(LSI LSI1064e SAS controller) on a single 200 gig SATA2 drive. this is where ESXI host and all guest sit.

Datastore2 is on a raid 5 with 3 Hitachi SATA2 1TB drives with 32MB buffers. this is controlled by a HP P600 SAS controller. This is where the data share is for openfiler.

Both Datastores are formatted with VMFS 3.31

Openfiler is setup as a NAS and its partition is formatted in XFS file system.

I have a linksys gigabit switch and am transferring files to this machine from windows 2003 server with a gigabit nic.

I have seen post all over VM's website and Openfiler about the slow network connectivity of openfiler when installed on ESXI. the only answer I have seen is to install VM tools.. Well I have VM tools installed and it is still slow.

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7 Replies
Erik_Zandboer
Expert
Expert

Hi,

Which Linksys switch are you utilising? I know that linksys has both blocking and non-blocking switches. If you have a blocking switch (eg no full port-to-port bandwidth) that might be your problem. As far as I can see, you are running all VMs from a single ESXi server right?? In this case, there should be NO impact in the number of physical NICs you have, since traffic should not leave the physical box. I assume that you created a separate IP storage vSwitch, and that you require no routing to get from the Openfiler to the ESXi VMkernel network right? Copying a large file inbetween VMs should give more insight. How many bandwidth between the VMs, how many bandwidth to the Openfiler Box, how many IOPS form the RAID5 array, and also important: How many IOPS from the single SATA drive? The last one is also important. SATA is pretty bad in random access. Now you are possibly pounding this single SATA drive with seeks from four different operating systems. Please post the number of KBytes per second and the number of IOPS from that drive.

If inside the box all is well, only then I woudl start looking at the physical network...

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TechFreakZ
Contributor
Contributor

I have had similar experiences in the past.

In the end I moved Openfiler on to its own physical machine, now its performance is acceptable(for the ISCSI volumes we use).

One thing that is worth testing is the client/server TTCP utility. It gives you a feeling as to what the maximum throughput your desktop/server can put through its TCP stack and out over the network, and is independant of disk performance. This would give you an idea of the max transfer "ceiling" your system can achieve. I found it useful anyway:

Also HD Tune does some nice disk level and file-system level benchmarking if you want to tune your ISCSI performance.

Best regards

Alex

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khenry567
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Hey fox15,

I am running the Openfiler vm on ESXi, but I cannot connect from the iscsi sw adaptor on my ESX 4 server to the LUN on my ESXi 3.5/Openfiler host server. I think it is something in the network setup of either Openfiler or ESXi 3.5 that is not working correctly. Would you help me out on this please? For my Openfiler "Network Access Config" I have listed both the address of my ESX 4 service console and the iSCSI initiator. I have put in the address of the Openfiler in the iscsi adapter config on the ESX 4 server. Did you just add the Openfiler vm by adding the vmx to inventory? All I have for networking on the ESXi/Openfiler host is the VM Network and the Management Network combined under vSwitch0. Is there more networking to be done on the ESXi 3.5 than that. Everything I am reading says no. Thanks in advance for your help on this

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vm_arch
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Remember that network traffic WITHIN a host/vSwitch 'should' run at memory speed -

If there is insufficient memory or if the present memory config is a bottleneck then this will affect network i/o within the host/vSwitch. In your case this is where I would be looking - if all VMs PLUS the openfiler are located inside the same host, then this (plus disk I/O) would be the first place to examine.

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J1mbo
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

A few things spring to mind,

- Does the HP RAID controller have BBWC installed? This is an absolute necessity with ESX.

- How many vCPU are assigned to OpenFiler guest? It looks like you have a single dual-core CPU, so I would assign only 1 to the VM.

- Don't be too optimistic with the Gigabit thing - I find inter-VM traffic -on an Opteron 1352 quad-core test box runs at about 250 Mbps, I don't know how old new or old your box is but the vSwitch speed may be a limiting factor for you also.

- Ensure pNICs are configured as auto-auto, do not specify 1000-F

HTH

Please aware points to any useful answer.

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TobiasKracht
Expert
Expert

How is configured your firewall?

StarWind Software R&D

StarWind Software R&D http://www.starwindsoftware.com
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khenry567
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

this is a reply to both TobiasKracht and J1mbo, thanks very much for taking the time.

I have resolved the problem. The first thing I did was get rid of ESXi 3.5 on my Dell 4600 and installed Openfiler directly on the server. This did not solve my issue of not being able to see Openfiler LUNs, but it did simplify things. I am convinced that the ESXi/Openfiler would have worked, but at the time I had been pounding my head to long to mess with it any longer.

The second thing I did was on my ESX 4 host I created a separate vmkernel iscsi vSwitch. Now, I had created this previously. The difference this time is I added a Service Console port group to the iscsi vmkernel vSwitch. I am convinced that this is what solved the issue. I had read about doing this in a couple of articles I read but the majority of Openfiler setup articles had no reference to adding the SC pg. In all the articles I read this step was vaque at best or not even mentioned.

I don't have the time right now to put the ESXi 3.5 back on the 4600 and reinstall Openfiler. Maybe someday but probably not.

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