35 replies to this topic

[Lee Barratt]

Hi Guys,

I am running 2 VMS, WHS2011 and WinXP, both have vmxnet3 drivers installed. The XP network says its running at 1.4GB/s and the WHS network is running at 10GB/s.

When I transfer files from one VM to the other i am getting speeds of 2MB/s. Why is this so slow??

I have run iperf and get speeds of 102 Mbits/sec

whilst the file transfer is in progress CPU usage is around 10% on both VM machines, but when I run iperf, CPU usage maxs out at 100% on the XP VM and about 55-65% on the WHS2011 VM.

Is the CPU being at 100% throttling the network?

I am running one physical network card,

Can anyone shed some light on this? I am a newbie to VMs but not to computers

thanks!

[]SK[]

If your using the vmxnet3 driver shouldn't it be showing 10GB?

*Edit*

Just checked my XP VM out and indeed it shows 1.4GB. Never noticed that before.
102Mbit is about right for a 1GB NIC no?

[ChuckFinley]

Those speeds (That are reported in Windows) are for the Virtual Adapters. Although its true that transferring speeds between VM's on the same does write directly between Memory and not hit the wire so to speak. The speed will only be 1Gbps on the Physical Adapter by the way. Have you applied all the latest patches to ESXi, I would highly recommend it. My CPU usage is always really low, Infact I am surprised at how efficient it is. I just need some more memory in my baby!

http://www.vmware.co...indPatch.portal

[Detection]

100% CPU is likely to bottleneck just about anything you try to do with your machine

[ChuckFinley]

]SK[, on 02 January 2013 - 22:27, said:

If your using the vmxnet3 driver shouldn't it be showing 10GB?

*Edit*

Just checked my XP VM out and indeed it shows 1.4GB. Never noticed that before.
102Mbit is about right for a 1GB NIC no?

It might be for XP that it shows 1.4Gbps, Don't have one to test it. I have only seen it at 10GBps. Budman could chime in though and tell us if this is the case.

Yes your right just over 100MB for 1Gbps.

[]SK[]

Well great thread anyway as you highlighted there's a new patch from the 20th of Dec I need to install

[Lee Barratt]

thanks, will install the patches and see how i get on

[Lee Barratt]

Ive installed the patches and am still getting around 2Mb/s transfer speeds between VMs.

any other ideas? shouldnt i be getting better speeds than this?

[]SK[]

Very much so. Can you try another OS?

Is it the same speed both ways? IE Client to Server and Server to Client?

[Lee Barratt]

I only have another installation of XP which i have tried with WHS and still getting the same results, unfortunatly i dont have another OS to try

the speed seems the same both ways

[ChuckFinley]

Yeah so if you have Two VMs running and copying between a file share you should be getting much faster speeds than that. Have you installed VMWare Tools on Both OS's. I assume you have if you are using the vmxnet NIC.

[Lee Barratt]

yes, have installed the latest patches and VMtools.

both VMs have one CPU allocated and each has 4Gb of memory allocated.

[+BudMan]

So I don't have an XP vm currently - but I could fire one up for sure.

But between my nas vm and win7 vm I show this, btw 102mbps is SLOW if you showing connected at gig speeds.

C:\Windows\System32>iperf -c storage -w 256k
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to storage, TCP port 5001
TCP window size:  256 KByte
------------------------------------------------------------
[276] local 192.168.1.210 port 49233 connected with 192.168.1.8 port 5001
[ ID] Interval	   Transfer	 Bandwidth
[276]  0.0-10.0 sec   599 MBytes   502 Mbits/sec

I should see if I can get that up a bit - my physical machines see much higher. 800Mbps should be seen on a gig network fairly easy.

So file copy from my nas vm to my win7 vm



So I am seeing 50MBytes per second in this test.

But curious to what disks your writing/reading from - are you just trying to copy a file from datastore drive of vm to another datastore drive on the other vm. My nas has raw access to the 3 drives it uses for storage. So the above tests were from one of those disks to the datastore drive of the win7 vm

Also curious --- you gave 4GB to each of your VMs, do you have more than 8 in your N40L?

So I did a test that I think more reflects what your doing more likely. And that is from datastore drive to datastore drive of each VM. And in that test I got only 23MBps



What else is your datastore disk doing at the time?? That performance is not going to be the best, your 2 different VMs are accessing the same physical disk. So yeah there is going to be some contention for time.

[Lee Barratt]

thanks, i have 10GB of memory in my N40L, an 8Gb and a 2Gb stick.

I have a drivepool in WHS, consisting of 2TB and 1.5TB WD Green drives

I am transferring files from the pool to the XP machine which has a second 2TB drive attached.

The VMs themselves were stored on the 250Gb drive, but I have moved them to another 2TB drive for now.

The ESXi is installed on a 8GB USB pen drive.

Thanks

[Lee Barratt]

a bit of progress maybe?

under the WHS2011 VM

If i "pull" a file from the xp machine to the WHS drivepool i get speeds of 13.5MB/s

if i "push" a file from the WHS drivepool to the xp machine i get speeds of 2MB/s

could that be a write issue with the XP HDD ? (E: 2TB)