does network communication among guests under same ESXi host go to physical/real network???

[stevemebius]

I am evaluating ESXi (was using vmware server 2.0 in the past).

I have guests under the same ESXi host communicating with each other. One host is the NSF server for the others.

The performance seems to be a lot slower than my previous vmware server setup.

I hope the network communication does not go out to the real network. Is there a way for me to verify that??

I know in the vSphere client. there is tab called "performance", but I am not sure if I can get what I want from there.

When I setup ESXi, I took all the defaults.

Many thanks.

Steve

[stevemebius]

Clarification: I mean one "guest" is the NFS server for the other guests.

[AntonVZhbankov]

If both VMs are connected to the same portgroup on the same vSwitch - traffic stays within vSwitch i.e. doesn go outside.

Not sure about situations when different portgroups with the same VLAN (or without one) on the same vSwitch, but different VLANs would definitely go to real network.

But you should take into consideration that when you accessing file server of any kind you also has disk as bottleneck. There are some tricky parts with ESXi and virtual disks.

Search forum for thick/thin/zeroedthick/eagerzeroedthick disks.

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MCSA, MCTS, VCP, VMware vExpert '2009

http://blog.vadmin.ru

[rmagoon]

If all guest VMs are within one host only, consider creating a seperate vSwitch with no external adapters connected. Add a vmkernel network and a virtual machine network. Attach the guest OS with the NFS server to your new virtual machine network. Then attach the NFS volume(s) to your ESX host.

[Kallex]

Hi!

What would be the expected performance of a "completely virtual" network?

We are planning to provide virtualized NFS share for two separate (local and remote) ESX boxes.

The gotcha is that we're looking to get really high performance NFS drive that is using ramdisk mount below the surface. Now naturally the remote ESX will get glan capped, but the local would preferably have higher throughput. We do have already disk based virtual NFS that's actually providing storage point for the very same host that runs the VM itself (this clause is just before someone says we can't provide NFS mount to the host from its own guest).

Br,

Kalle