We recently migrated to new DELL M620 blades running ESXi 4.1 (Build 721871) with two 10Gbit Dual port QLogic QMD8262 NIC. We have all the latest VMWare updates, NIC drivers & NIC Firmware. These NICs back on to DELL M8024K 10Gbit switches with the latest firmware as well and from there link to the rest of our network infrastructure via LAGs.
Whilst the majority of systems have migrated over without any discernable issues one particular application, Axway Tumbleweed AKA SecureTransport, has been having some serious issues with network comms. If the Tumbleweed Backend server does any transfers via FTP/SFTP (which go via the Tumbleweed Edge server) the transfer rates are extremely slow or transfers fail. This issue is specific to the new blades, the previous M600 blades in another enclosure does not exhibit this issue. If we move the Edge server to an old host, the issue "goes away" but is still reproducible when the Edge server is talking to one of our VMs on the new blades. The issue is still present even when Edge server and the FTP server are on the same host.
If the Tumbleweed Backend server talks direct to a system for FTP/SFTP transfer then most times it seems to be ok with transfers but on the odd occasion still has an issue.
All this seems to point back to vmware network related. I've managed to create an isolated test of this on our Production network but am unable to reproduce the problem, so it's somewhat vague as to what's going on. We seem to have narrowed it down to our segregated hosts only on Fabric B on the enclosure which is connected via the Mezzanine cards to the blades.
I'm just wondering if anyone else out there may have seen anything similar? We've also had a separate issue of network connectivity between VMs across separate hosts as well which seems specific to this infrastructure setup. We've already taken steps to resolve the connectivity issue (appears to be a QLogic network driver issue) but this issue with Tumbleweed prevails.
http://communities.vmware.com/thread/341266
http://vmknowledge.wordpress.com/2012/04/05/dell-m8024-k-10g-switch-and-qlogic-qme8242-k-10gbe-and-v...
Cheers,
Dave
