couldn't enable TSO on a physical NIC?

[niceguy001]

hi folks,

i'm trying to turn on the TCP Segmentation Offload(so-called TSO) on my phisical NIC in ESXi host.

the environment is  ESXi 6.5.0, build 5310538

and the physical NIC were all "Intel Corporation 82599EB 10-Gigabit SFI/SFP+ Network Connection"

driver is ixgbe

i followed this vmware kb and use SSH to command the hosts:

ethtool -K vmnic0 tso on

but i got this result: Cannot set device tcp segmentation offload settings: Function not implemented

(addtionally, i couldn't enable linux guest os TSO, too)

i've tried to search vmware kb but didn't help...

does anyone know how to fix this?

so much appreciate!

[Sreec]

I assume you have updated the local.sh file to ensure it is persistent across reboots . Can share the output for ethtool -k vmnic0 ?

[niceguy001]

ok i got the result from the command ethtool -k vmnic0

Offload parameters for vmnic0:

Cannot get device udp large send offload settings: Function not implemented

Cannot get device generic segmentation offload settings: Function not implemented

rx-checksumming: on

tx-checksumming: on

scatter-gather: on

tcp segmentation offload: on

udp fragmentation offload: off

generic segmentation offload: off

so does that mean i do not need to worry about the TSO?

[Sreec · Accepted solution]

Yes ,that is what i can confirm --> TSO is enabled as of now. If you try to disable TSO it should also fail with same message        command   -- > ethtool -K eth# tso off  and check ethtool -k vmnic0 you will still see TSO in on state. That means NIC driver is not allowing you to disable it and somewhere in the BIOS you will have a setting for TSO to enable/disable.

[Sreec]

For the linux VM,first and foremost guest should be compatible with respective ESXI version which you can verify from VMware VMware Compatibility Guide - System Search   and the NIC driver should be vmxnet3/2

[niceguy001]

ok, now i can figure out the TSO settings.

thank you very much!

BTW

i use the command: sudo ethtool -K thenic tso on on the linux VM to turn on tso

and it worked, solving my problem.

thanks anyway