CentOS 7 Network problem between Host and Guest Only.

[JMA100]

I'm experiencing slow network connectivity between my CentOS 7 host and its vmware workstation player 12 guests, slowness in both directions.  I'm wondering if anyone else has seen this and figured out what to do.

Symptoms:

1) ssh in either direction, I intermittently observe pauses of 1 to many seconds between keystrokes.

2) munin has a hard time collecting data between the guest and the host - leaving gaps in graphs.

What works perfectly:

Host to the rest of the world.  Guests to the rest of the world.  World to the host.  World to the guests.  Guests to Guests all work as expected.

I've verified the issue on two machines, both running the latest CentOS 7.1 distribution.  System configurations:

Machine 1: (At Work)

Dell Workstation - Sandy Bridge 6 core, 96 GB of ram.

Tested Host CentOS 7.1 to windows 7 guest (with cygwin) via ssh.

Player 7.1.2

Machine 2: (At Home)

Asus MB with AMD A5700, 4 core, 32 gb of ram.

Tested Host CentOS 7.1 to Centos 6.7 guest and Centos 7.1 Guest.

Workstation Player 12

Tested all three network configurations (bridged, nat, host only) with the same result.

With Machine 2, had previously windows 8.1 with Workstation Player 12.  All networking worked as expected.

I've seen several articles on the web concerning adjusting TCP segmentation offload and other nic features.  The ones I read really didn't match my issue, those described no connectivity between host and guests, but I tried the adjustments anyway, but they didn't help.

Thanks,

John

[JMA100]

I did a further experiment with machine 2:

Using nested virtualization, installed centos 7, installed vmware workstaton 12, then a centos 7 inside worstation.  Same network problem.

Then, using nested virtualization, installed ubunti 14.04, installed workstation 12, then ran the same centos 7 I created above.  No network problem.

So in summary, the centos 7 network slowness problem can be reproduced without bare metal machines, completely eliminating hardware setup as the root cause.

I solved the problem with machine 2 by replacing the centos 7 install with ubuntu 14.04.  Network works fine now. 

My only conclusion is that it's either a bug in centos 7 or vmware workstation/player.

Thanks,

John