Is it worth it to go to Jumbo Frames on NFS Vsphere 5.0?

[shanrid]

We are getting ready to upgrade our HA, DRS cluster from ESX 4.1 to ESXi 5.  We are testing upgrading the networking just on the storage side to Jumbo Frames. Vmware has given mixed signals as to if we should move forward to Jumbo Frames. When we have had slowness problems before they always question why i am not using Jumbo Frames. I just put in a ticket asking about the process of upgrading to Jumbo Frames and the tech i am talking to now says is acting like using the work that will take to get to Jumbo Frames is probably not worth it?  Anyone have experience changing to jumbo Frames? If so have you seen a large improvement?

[vMario156]

Best practice: Always use Jumbo Frames if possible ......but they must be well implemented. Otherwise you can fast run into network problems. Jumbo Frames need to be implemented in the whole infrastructure. SAN / NAS, physical Switches, vSwitches, VMkernel Ports etc.

The performance benefits depends on the workload. Typically it could be an improvment round about 10-20%. There are several blog post out there of people tested this out. I also tested this out myself with the same result.

Regards,

Mario

[shanrid]

Thank you for the response. Our SAN, physical switch, virtual switch, port groups are set up to use Jumbo Frames. My problem seems to be that my networking team set up the Jumbo Frames part of the SAN to use a different IP. We use NFS so even though I name my NFS mount points the same the other hosts cannot migrate vms to my new jumbo Frame host. I have 22 hosts that I am migrating to Jumbo Frames. The only way i can see around it is to turn off the vms, unregister them from cluster and reregister them from the new IP/NFS mount. We are talking about 400 VMs. So i guess the question comes up if the improvement is worth all of the downtime and work.  10/20% seems worth it to me in the long run  I guess it should be a mangagement call.

[eeg3]

It really depends on your workload, and some believe it is more trouble and complexity than it is worth. Have a look at the following write-up: http://www.boche.net/blog/index.php/2011/01/24/jumbo-frames-comparison-testing-with-ip-storage-and-v...