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    C2758/ESXi 5.5 - only getting 400 Mbps on e1000 driver

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved Virtualization
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    • D
      dc81
      last edited by

      I'm running the latest pfsense vm on ESXi 5.5 (1331820) on the supermicro c2758 (SYS-5018A-FTN4). I'm using 2 ports for LAN/WAN and the LAN has several VLANs. The VM has 4 CPUs and 6GB of ram assigned to it. However, I just switch to 1Gbps fiber and only getting about 400 Mbps on speedtests. If I connect my laptop directly to the gateway, I get 900+ Mbps.

      I've ran several iperf tests on various machine pairings to see if the bottleneck is somewhere else, but I can consistently get 900+ Mbps across the network except when pfsense vm is involved. I plan on switching to vmxnet 2 or 3, but I've read a couple places that I would lose VLAN capability?? Or is there something else I should be looking into. Disable TSO and LRO is already checked in my settings.

      Thanks

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      • H
        heper
        last edited by

        no experience with that soc while using hypervisor but:

        vmxnet3 is builtin to pfSense since 2.2. it works fine with vlans.

        not sure if you will gain performance or not.

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        • C
          cmb
          last edited by

          You'll need vmxnet3. It works fine with VLANs in every situation I've seen or tried, which is a lot. There apparently is some issue there if you're tagging VLANs inside the VM, and have >5 NICs IIRC, judging by a FreeBSD PR, but haven't encountered that situation.

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          • G
            GomezAddams
            last edited by

            Don't bring your VLANs into the virtual machine. Create a virtual NIC for each VLAN and let the vswitch handle the VLAN tagging.

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            • H
              heper
              last edited by

              @GomezAddams:

              Don't bring your VLANs into the virtual machine. Create a virtual NIC for each VLAN and let the vswitch handle the VLAN tagging.

              Why?

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              • C
                cmb
                last edited by

                @heper:

                @GomezAddams:

                Don't bring your VLANs into the virtual machine. Create a virtual NIC for each VLAN and let the vswitch handle the VLAN tagging.

                Why?

                Usually performs better because the host takes advantage of hardware VLAN offloading on the NICs.

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