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lucasmv
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

network poor performance on guest esxi 5

Hi All,

Iam creating a lab environment with nest esxi servers

I have installed a esxi 5 on a physical machine and two VMs esxi 5.0.

Everything installed correctly, but Iam having poor performance on the network on Vms esxi 5.0.

The vswitch on the esxi virtual machine recognize 1000 Full, but I am having issues on the network, Vmotion takes too much time, and in the profile compliance for HA and DRS Iam not having full compliance.

I also have a openfiler to simulate a iscsi nas, the openfiler is installed as a VM on the esxi physical machine.

Does anyone have any ideas to help me?

Thanks

Lucas

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admin
Immortal
Immortal

What kind of hardware do you have?  Are you using virtualized HV?

I have more questions, but maybe you could post vmware.log files for one of the ESXi VMs and one of the nested VMs.

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lucasmv
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Thanks for reply,

I am running on inter core i7 3770, with hardware virtualization enabled on bios.

Follow the attachment two vmware logs, vmware_esxi.log is the vmware log for one esxi VMs and vmware_vcenter.log is log for a vm under esxi1.

The Esxi Vm only support E1000 ethernet adapter, do you think if I upgrade the esxi installed on a physical machine to esxi 5.1 I will have more performace? Do you know if esxi 5.1 support VMXNET3 ethernet adapter?

Thanks

Lucas

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admin
Immortal
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lucasmv wrote:

Thanks for reply,

I am running on inter core i7 3770, with hardware virtualization enabled on bios.

Follow the attachment two vmware logs, vmware_esxi.log is the vmware log for one esxi VMs and vmware_vcenter.log is log for a vm under esxi1.

Your configuration looks great for ESXi 5.0 on ESXi 5.0.  However, you might be suffering from CPU over-commitment.  Your CPU has 8 hyper-threads, but a hyper-thread isn't quite the same as a true core, so the true CPU count is a little shy of 8.  You are running at least three VMs: two ESXi VMs and the open filer VM.  Are both ESXi VMs 8 vCPUs?  If so, you've got at least 2X over-commitment.  How many total vCPUs are there in the nested VMs?  Do you have enough physical CPUs to support the total load without sharing?

The Esxi Vm only support E1000 ethernet adapter, do you think if I upgrade the esxi installed on a physical machine to esxi 5.1 I will have more performace?

Yes, probably, but it has nothing to do with the ethernet adapter.  Performance of virtualized HV improved between 5.0 and 5.1.  Note that some configuration changes are necessary.  vhv.allow is not necessary in /etc/vmware/config on 5.1, because it is always allowed.  However, each VM that wants to make use of VHV must have "vhv.enable = TRUE" in its .vmx file (VHV is no longer the default for ESX guest OS types).

Do you know if esxi 5.1 support VMXNET3 ethernet adapter?

Yes, if you upgrade your ESXi *VM* to 5.1, you can use the vmxnet3 adapter, which might improve performance.  However, you can do this whether or not you upgrade the version of ESXi installed on the physical machine.  Note that the vmxnet3 adapter is only helpful if there is a spare CPU available to run the helper thread that does transmit/receive coalescing.  Given your limited CPU resources, vmxnet3 adapters for the ESXi VMs may not help.

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Allanloran
Contributor
Contributor

don't forget to install vmtools inside the vm if you want to be able to user vmnext3 virtual network card this will help the vm to access the network. for vmotion if your vmotion network is shared with iscsi or nfs or vm network, you will not have a good performance, vmotion network must be dedicated and isolated (data are not secure) .

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lucasmv
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Hi, Thanks again

Iam over-commitment the cpu in my lab, Both the two esxi vms have 8 vCPUs.

My nested vms, I have 4 vCPUs for Vcenter + 1 vCPUS for Active Directory.

My openfiler has 1 Vcpus.

I think, I will try to reduce the number of vCPUS in the esxi VMs.

Thanks for your information

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admin
Immortal
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virtualquebec wrote:

don't forget to install vmtools inside the vm if you want to be able to user vmnext3 virtual network card

This is not applicable to ESXi as a guest, since there are no VMware Tools for ESXi.  However, ESXi 5.1 has a built-in vmxnet3 driver for when it is installed in a VM.  This driver is not officially supported, but then again, nested ESXi is not officially supported either.

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Allanloran
Contributor
Contributor

i have a similar config 3 esxi, freenas as iscsi san-nas, my vcenter run with 2vcpu and 4 go, ad 1 vcpu is enough even with 40 vm. i have also vshield installed, trend micro deep security 9, vcops and view... looking for vcould director in next weeks... I have also few plugin like eaton ipm for vcenter netapp...

always try to add more memory before vcpu...