internal vswitch speed

[matthewnewton09]

vsphere 5

VM win 2008 R2

I am running backup software on one VM. This backup software is backing up a diffrent VM on the same host. Both these VM are in the same vSwitch. The backup spends a lot of the time during the backup backing up nothing. By that I mean one of the VM hard drive is 2 tb in size however there is only 800 gb of data on that VM right now. (expecting a lot of growth here)

While it is backing up the nothing I see lots of network trafic but no read or write for this backup.

the resource monitor windows show network traffic of 630 Mbps

the network adapter is vmxnet 3

there is four 1 gb nic attached to this vSwitch

my understanding is that this should be a internal vSwitch communication.

my question is there a way of increasing this internal comunication speed.

[weinstein5]

Welcome to the Community - Are both VMs on the same subnet - because if they are not the traffic will go out to the physical network and back in -

[matthewnewton09]

both are on the same subnet.

I do not see any network traffic on the nic on the other VM so my guess would be that it is pulling the data from the host directly.

the host is also on the same subnet.

[mokymura]

Hi

Traffic between VM in the same vSwitch and in the same port group goes internally over the vswitch: without going out to the physical layer > this can be easily demostrate doing a tcpdump of the pnic and you will not see any traffic.

In this case, even traffic goes internally in the vswitch, you should see the traffic on the VM where you are taking the backup from > if the backup is a normal file agent backup.

If you are backing up at VM level, things goes different.

Regards