VMXNET 3, Win Servers, gig connections, any advantages?

[HendersonD]

I have a total of 26VMs, here is the mix:

Win Server 2003 Standard 32 bit - 22

Win Sever 2003 Enterprise 64 bit - 2

Win Server 2008 Enterprise 64 bit - 2

All of these have at least one nic and a few that need iSCSI Luns also have a second nic. All nics are VMXNET 2 (Enhanced). All nics have a gig connection. I have two physical nics for iSCSI traffic and two physical nics for my VM Network. I utilize etherchannel on my cisco switches. The question is would my VMs benefit from using the VMXNET 3 network adapter? I am using vSphere 4.0 update 1 and have a Netapp FAS3020 as the backend storage

[Anders_Gregerse]

Short answer, Yes.

Long answer, they would benefit slightly. I would schedule the "migration" to VMXNET3 with the next maintenance window. They would benefit more from the pvscsi.

I personally go for all free benefits (like VMXNET3, PVscsi, jumboframes, partition alignment, e.g.) Each in themselves are small performance gains, but added together they reduce cpu load and increase performance on different parts of the infrastructure.

[HendersonD]

I am of the same thinking on this. Recently I aligned all of my VMs and will be pursuing jumbo frames in the near future. I can slowly migrate all of my VMs over to VMXNET3 over time doing it off hours. With my recent migration from ESX 3.5 to ESX 4 (vSphere) everything seems a bit snappier already.

I use an NFS datastore for all of my VMs. Two of my VMs (Exchange 2007 and SQL 2005) also have LUNs presented to them via Microsoft's iSCSI initiator. Can I even use pcscsi?

[AndreTheGiant]

See also:

Andre