ESXi - N40L - Slow Network Speeds

[n_K]

Humm strange for XP to be doing that oddly, maybe faulty ESXi vmxnet3 drivers?

Got a server 2003 SP2 here (not on a N40L but a HP proliant) and it runs full speed if I push files to it or pull files from it using windows and linux clients.

[+BudMan MVC]

"108010209 Bytes/sec."

Really? What are the disks involved here? That is some SCREAMING performance!! Are they SSD? Or do you have a different controller added or just the native controller?

So what is your VM to VM peformance?

Well maybe not all that screaming, depending I guess -- just did a test from my storage vm to my physical machine.. And seeing real close to what you got

C:\test>robocopy \\storage\media\cleanup c:\test test.mp4

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
   ROBOCOPY	 ::	 Robust File Copy for Windows
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

  Started : Fri Jan 04 20:53:30 2013

   Source = \\storage\media\cleanup\
	 Dest : c:\test\

	Files : test.mp4

  Options : /COPY:DAT /R:1000000 /W:30

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

						   1	\\storage\media\cleanup\
100%		New File			 650.8 m		test.mp4

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

			   Total	Copied   Skipped  Mismatch	FAILED	Extras
	Dirs :		 1		 0		 1		 0		 0		 0
   Files :		 1		 1		 0		 0		 0		 0
   Bytes :  650.86 m  650.86 m		 0		 0		 0		 0
   Times :   0:00:06   0:00:06					   0:00:00   0:00:00


   Speed :		   105094805 Bytes/sec.
   Speed :			6013.572 MegaBytes/min.

   Ended : Fri Jan 04 20:53:37 2013

And didn't realize it until I made a change about offload in the nic driver on my storage vm for testing that my son was streaming a moving at the time of that test ;)

Nothing but amazed at the performance you get get out of such a cheap little box... The OP clearly has something really jacked up.

[Lee Barratt]

something really is screwed up with mine.

I performed another iperf test between 2 XP VMs last night and was getting around 400MBits/s

I am tempted to do a reinstallation of ESXi and the VMs and see if there was anywhere i went wrong.

I am currently booting ESXi from a USB drive and storing the VMs on the 250GB drive which came with the N40L. Am wondering if other guys have a similar setup with these boxes?

[Lee Barratt]

I've just installed 2 new VMs - XP - and performed an iperf test, I now get 800Mbits/sec............a step in the right direction, just need to reinstall a WHS VM and do a same test,

[+John Teacake MVC]

To RAW Map them you need Dedicated Storage for that Disk IN the virtual machine. Can you do that. You shouldn't need to with your set up. Sorry I meant how are they formatted as in Thin Provisioned or Thick Provisioned etc.

[n_K]

To RAW Map them you need Dedicated Storage for that Disk IN the virtual machine. Can you do that. You shouldn't need to with your set up. Sorry I meant how are they formatted as in Thin Provisioned or Thick Provisioned etc.

the XP and WHS vm are both thick provisioned

[Guest]

"108010209 Bytes/sec."

Really? What are the disks involved here? That is some SCREAMING performance!! Are they SSD? Or do you have a different controller added or just the native controller?

So what is your VM to VM peformance?

Its a normal 2TB SATA. My physical PC is SSD.

[+BudMan MVC]

"I am currently booting ESXi from a USB drive and storing the VMs on the 250GB drive which came with the N40L. Am wondering if other guys have a similar setup with these boxes?"

I am using the 250GB that came with it as my datastore, I really did not see the point of installing esxi to usb to save a few gig of space on the 250GB drive that esxi requires. Depending on your setup usb might make sense, say for example your host did not have any local storage.

So your running embedded version of esxi vs installable version? If you were going to setup a raid array for your datastore - sure use usb to boot esxi so that its not installed on your array, etc.

But sounds like your wanting to do what I am doing.. Using a VM as a NAS/Storage/File server - which you have added disks to use as space for this VM. So raw should be an option for you just like in my case. These other disks are not going to be used by another other VMS - they are just storage drives. The 250 is my datastore drive - this is where all VMs OSes get installed - and to be honest 250GB is a quite a bit of space for just VMs that are just test/play boxes and not serving up data. For example my pfsense has a 8GB drive assigned to it on the datastore, and that is over kill ;) My linux shell box also has 8GB, again overkill for what it does. w7 I gave 40, again overkill and setup as thin anyway -- if your going to be storing data on your storage Vms other drives.. 250GB is quite a bit of space ;)

Did not see the reason to save a couple of gig by installing to a USB. But it really shouldn't matter which way you go from a performance point of view of esxi, other than maybe bootup time. I would have to hope mine boots up faster than yours off sata installed hdd vs your usb ;)

[n_K]

I've got ESXi installed on USB, wasn't aware you could install it on the storage hard drive, all the documentation I read at the time (mostly Dell stuff) said you NEEDED to install ESXi itself on a USB because otherwise you couldn't use the drives for storage if you installed it on them (USB gets formatted fully as FAT32 whereas ESXi storage volumes are VMFS3 or 4 or 5)

[Guest]

You can install ESXi and run VM's using just one HDD.

[Lee Barratt]

But sounds like your wanting to do what I am doing.. Using a VM as a NAS/Storage/File server - which you have added disks to use as space for this VM. So raw should be an option for you just like in my case. These other disks are not going to be used by another other VMS - they are just storage drives. The 250 is my datastore drive - this is where all VMs OSes get installed - and to be honest 250GB is a quite a bit of space for just VMs that are just test/play boxes and not serving up data. For example my pfsense has a 8GB drive assigned to it on the datastore, and that is over kill ;) My linux shell box also has 8GB, again overkill for what it does. w7 I gave 40, again overkill and setup as thin anyway -- if your going to be storing data on your storage Vms other drives.. 250GB is quite a bit of space ;)

Did not see the reason to save a couple of gig by installing to a USB. But it really shouldn't matter which way you go from a performance point of view of esxi, other than maybe bootup time. I would have to hope mine boots up faster than yours off sata installed hdd vs your usb ;)

yes thats more or less what i want to do, have several VMs for test/play boxes. I want a datastore to stream movies to my XMBC - hope to use WHS2011 for that.