NIC @ 10MB VLance - VMWare

wisowebs

Hey Guys:

A few months back I installed PFSense in our ESXi 5.1 and was humming along as a quite firewall for a small client with just a few tunnels. Recently we moved quite a few servers and traffic has spiked and I am seeing packet errors and they are having some speed issues. That brought me to check the NIC speed and it came in at 10MB. I was suprised, I called my contact @ VMWare and he told me it would the vlance nic because I used the vmware tools package from PFsense. He mentioned to install the VMWare tools and my nic settings (Name and Mac) will remain the same and it will then use vmxnet after post and startup. Does this sound accurate? I did my reading and no need for vmxnet3 or anything and the only reason I hesitate to remove the NICS and or just add e1000 is this is now a production heavy firewall and want to limit downtime. Also I was reading I could beef of the cpu and that would get better through-put of the vlance..? I searched these forums, but nothing to new.

PF Sense 2.0.3

Any help anyone could provide I would appreciate, and if you are in the Chicagoland area, would be happy to buy you a beer :)

wisowebs

Can anyone please give me any suggestions, I am getting quite a few packet errors now and think these are related.

wisowebs

So I had another call with VMWare and he advised the vlance NIC will actually run fast than 10MB based on the CPU power. I have given it 4vCPU to be safe, and I see traffic moving close to 20MB at times, however during this time packet errors happen frequently. I have run the packet capture and checked the logs and states and do not really see a rhyme or reason, sorry if I am somewhat new to this can anyone else advise on where I can look to troubleshoot those packet errors.

They are only happening on the LAN interface.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

jimp

Moving to e1000 is the real answer, unfortunately.

wisowebs

Thanks jimp!

I found this as well on vmware.

Networking
e1000: Supported Emulated Intel 82545EM Gigabit Ethernet NIC
Enhanced VMXNET: Supported Second generation VMware virtual NIC
Vlance: Not Supported Emulated AMD 79C970 PCnet32 Lance NIC
VMXNET: Not Supported VMware virtual NIC
VMXNET 3: Not Supported Third generation VMware virtual NIC

I did my reading on my work to swap out the NICS and it seems pretty staright forward. Just remove the flexible adapters, and add the e1000. Then re-configure the interfaces with the duplicate IPs I used? Any gotchas I should be looking for or at?

Thanks for your reply I appreciate it, just pulling my hair out and cannot get my work done until Friday evening.

wisowebs

I just removed the NICs and added back the e1000's and re-configured the networking and everything is running much better. No errors on the interface, thanks for the suggestion.

Thanks jimp, reading yours and Chris book now. Glad you both love realtek NICs ;-)