Kick it Old School. NetBSD 1.5 Network port 10Mb

[Brian_Wing]

Community

I know we are all speed demons in search of greater bandwidth and network speed, but I have a question....

Can a Virtual Switch, Distributed, Regular or otherwise be set to 10 Meg?  I don't have the Nexus V1000 which I'm guessing might be able to do it, I see the traffic shaping options, but what I'm really looking to do is set the adapter speed since NetBSD is older than most dirt we are having issues with builds that unfortuantely must be done on this ancient OS.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Best Regards

Brian

[chriswahl]

A physical NIC can be set to 10 Mb, either full or half duplex.

[Brian_Wing]

chriswahl,

That's great information, do you have any instructions on how to do that?

Thanks

Brian

[chriswahl]

Edit the physical NIC in a vSwitch and set the negotiation speed.

[Brian_Wing]

Okay, I've been able to do that on some interfaces however, this is not a very workable solution.

I guess my hope was being able to lock it down either at the V-Port layer or closer to the Guest VM.

BTW, Cisco UCS with 10GB Ethernet do not have this as an option, nor would I imagine anyone would want to knock most interfaces down to 10MB, but this is an odd scenario, to be sure!

Thanks

Brian

[chriswahl]

Does NetBSD not allow you to change the negotiated speed of the virtual NIC?

I know you can do this in Windows (Device Manager > NIC > Properties > Advanced > Speed / Duplex).

[Brian_Wing]

Well, if it does, we don't know how to do it 😉  we've been pursuing this as an option but haven't found much yet.  So was hoping to do it at the virtual "physical" layer.

We inherited this environment, and the OS was built circa 1993, so 100MB was probably only a dream at that point.

Best regards

Brian

[Josh26]

Just to clarify.. what are you trying to solve?

VMware's internal switching isn't impacted by the speed of the virtual switch port. Whether it's 100MB, 1Gb or 10GbE, internal servers will talk at whatever speed they can.

If you're trying to get the vNIC driver to support NetBSD - just dropping the speed won't help.

[Brian_Wing]

Josh,

The goal would be to set either a vswitch, or a DV Port Group to a 10MB speed as opposed to native speed of the interface.

We have some strange problems with our NetBSD VM machines.  We mount (via NFS) filesystems which are used in our software build process, we inherited these NetBSD systems through an acquisition, but did not inherit the VMWare hosts, just VMDK/OVFs.  So we've built out a new VMWare environment which utilizes CiscoUCS, 10GB ethernet, Netapp NFS.

Our hypothesis is that the age of the OS may be part of the issue and the "flexible" adapters that work on them, while supporting 1G connectivity could be the root of the issues.

My goal is to test our hypothesis by putting one of these NetBSD VMs into a 10MB vSwitch and see how the builds behave.

I have built out a test system which I have been able to set the NIC speed to 10MB, and am waiting to hear back on results.  I was really hoping that we'd have some flexibility with a Distributed Virtual Switch and be able to set port speed, port by port, or even by port group.

Hope this helps clarify what I'm trying to accomplish.

[Josh26]

Note that even if NetBSD reports its NIC speed as 10MB this is just cosmetic -  it's going to operate at gigabit speeds. Whether that will impact your issue, I'd be interested in.