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Re: Performance issues when using VSA on ESX with VMXNET3 driver

 
5y53ng
Regular Advisor

Re: Performance issues when using VSA on ESX with VMXNET3 driver

Hi Braak,

 

Any update on your support case?

M.Braak
Frequent Advisor

Re: Performance issues when using VSA on ESX with VMXNET3 driver

We stopped using the VSA's. We cant work with the product if it isn't stable and lacks of proper support :(

Last advice of vmware was setting the --iops parameter to 1.

 

Hope you have more luck

M.Braak
Frequent Advisor

Re: Performance issues when using VSA on ESX with VMXNET3 driver

Let's do some new testing with ESXi 5.1 and Lefthand OS 10 as soon it's GA. (4th of December)

I hope the problems are fixed by now..

 

New version 10 VSA's have 2 vCPU's and should work a lot better.

Also see http://marcelbraak.wordpress.com/2012/11/03/saniq-10-lefthand-os-soon-to-be-released/  

5y53ng
Regular Advisor

Re: Performance issues when using VSA on ESX with VMXNET3 driver

I have had very positive experiences with ESXi 5 and 9.5. Like the blog post says, 2 vcpus provides a noticeable boost in performance.
I hope to see the write performance increase in 10.0 as I did notice a dip in throughput after upgrading to 9.5.

I think the one thing HP needs to do is add a CMC plugin for the vSphere client. If I could manage my SANiQ cluster from the vsphere client that would be killer.
vlho
Advisor

Re: Performance issues when using VSA on ESX with VMXNET3 driver

Hi all,

 

I hope that bonding between more virtual NICs will be supported in VSA 10.0 at last.

With only one NIC is VSA very "slow"...

oikjn
Honored Contributor

Re: Performance issues when using VSA on ESX with VMXNET3 driver

for VSA's, why can't you just do the bonding before presenting to the VM?  Thats what I'm doing in hyper-v and it works fine.

vlho
Advisor

Re: Performance issues when using VSA on ESX with VMXNET3 driver

Hi oikjn,

 

of course, I have bonding before presenting to the VM (VSA) but it is failover type (active-pasive) i. e. I can see traffic flow on one NIC only in realtime.

oikjn
Honored Contributor

Re: Performance issues when using VSA on ESX with VMXNET3 driver

I don't really follow vmware much... can it not do something like LCAP bonding at the host?  I would have thought it could do that.  If not, I guess the guest is the only option, but LCAP or the equivalent requires the switches to accept that active-active link so if you don't have that you can't really solve your problem through the VSA anyway.

RonsDavis
Frequent Advisor

Re: Performance issues when using VSA on ESX with VMXNET3 driver

VMware can nic bond, but LACP doesn't really give you twice the bandwidth unless you are talking to multiple destinations. It isn't the recommended way of doing things with VMware, as their built in load balancing and redundancies work better.

Also, you won't have more than 1 gbps unless you are using VMXNET3, which is what this whole thread is about. All of the other nics are 1 gbps, so actually bonding channels won't get you 2 gbps of throughput out of a 1 gpbs virtual nic.

 

oikjn
Honored Contributor

Re: Performance issues when using VSA on ESX with VMXNET3 driver

understood.  my point was purely, why bond in the VM?  what method of bonding inside the VM would give you full bonding bandwidth?