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    VMware ESXi 6.0 tuning for 2.5GBit/s throughput?

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved Virtualization
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    • C
      Crunk_Bass
      last edited by

      Hello everyone,

      a week ago I got myself a cheap root server to experiment with.
      Currently I am working on setting up pfSense on ESXi 6.0 to do NAT for a few virtual machines on the server.
      I got IPv4 and IPv6 working the way I want but the network speed isn't that great.

      The server has an Intel Atom C2750 processor (8x2.4GHz) with 16GB RAM and 2.5Gbit/s NICs.

      I assigned the pfSense VM 1 vCPU and 512MB RAM. For network adapters I used VMXNET 3 and installed Open-VM-Tools from package list.
      As a client I set up a Debian 7 VM with 1 vCPU and 256MB RAM. Network adapter is VMXNET 3 and Open-VM-Tools are installed.

      For testing the speed I used a server in the same datacenter with an Intel Atom C2350 (2x1,7GHz) with 4GB RAM and 2.5Gbit/s NICs.
      I created a sparse file with the size of 10GB to test the download speed of the VM with a simple wget.

      The best speed I can get with the pfSense VM doing NAT at the moment is 108MB/s.

      100%[===================================>] 10,737,418,240  108M/s   in 95s
      
      2016-04-05 18:33:21 (108 MB/s) - `/dev/null' saved [10737418240/10737418240]
      

      The CPU load of the pfSense VM was at 100% when running the transfer. So I decided to give it more vCPUs, which surprisingly resulted in a much lower transfer speed of 72.5MB/s.

      100%[===================================>] 10,737,418,240 72.5M/s   in 2m 19s
      
      2016-04-05 19:11:22 (73.6 MB/s) - `/dev/null' saved [10737418240/10737418240]
      

      If I connect the Debian VM directly without using pfSense for NAT I get nearly wire speed at 280MB/s.

      100%[===================================>] 10,737,418,240  280M/s   in 37s
      
      2016-04-05 20:34:33 (279 MB/s) - `/dev/null' saved [10737418240/10737418240]
      

      Any ideas what I could try to achive higher speeds when using pfSense?

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      • C
        cistech
        last edited by

        Have you test changing VMXNET3 for E1000 for example?
        I saw other posts where there are some tweaks to NIC and pfsense values to achieve high perf.

        If you already resolved, please share!

        thx

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        • C
          Crunk_Bass
          last edited by

          I think I did but I don't know for sure if I tried changing the type to E1000.
          This server is running Debian Linux now because I couldn't get it to work.

          I'll buy another server this week to test a few things.
          Do you have any other suggestions what I could try?

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          • C
            cmb
            last edited by

            e1000 would be slower, and is only 1 Gb, don't bother.

            A C2758 will barely do 2.5 Gb on bare metal, it definitely won't in a VM with 1 vCPU. It might not in a VM with all 8 cores as vCPUs, but that would at least get closer.

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            • S
              Soyokaze
              last edited by

              @Crunk_Bass:

              The CPU load of the pfSense VM was at 100% when running the transfer. So I decided to give it more vCPUs, which surprisingly resulted in a much lower transfer speed of 72.5MB/s.

              Bad idea to give more vCpu than VM actually needs.
              Also, I had VERY inconsistent speed measurements when running test directly from pfS box, like ~5 mB\s on it and whole 40 mB\s on machine behind pfS.

              Need full pfSense in a cloud? PM for details!

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