Problem
Network speed between a VM and another machine which is not residing on the same host, is 11MB/s at most.
Topology
Facts
ESXi5 version is 5.0.0.504890
VM has the latest Vmware Tools installed
VM is using E1000 network driver
Physical box has Win Srv 2008 R2 as the OS
CrystalDiskMark says the drive on physical box can read/write 100MB/s
vCenter is another vm on esx
both vm and physical box are showing 1Gbps link speed
Configuration Networking shows vmnic0 as 1000 Full
NTttcp is a client/server tool from Microsoft for measuring pure network throughput
Here's what I've done so far:
Test1:
VM is running Filezilla FTP Server (default settings, one user account made)
Physical box is running Filezilla FTP Client (default settings)
Physical box is uploading a big file to FTP server
Transfer speed (as observed by Windows Task Manager on both machines): ~11MB/s (bad)
Physical box is downloading that file from FTP server
Transfer speed (as observed by Windows Task Manager on both machines): still ~11MB/s (bad)
Could it be disk performance issue?
Test2:
Physical box is running ntttcpr.exe -a 6 -m 6,0,VM_IP_ADDRESS
VM is running ntttcps.exe -a 6 -m 6,0,PHY_BOX_IP_ADDRESS
Transfer speed (as observed by Windows Task Manager on both machines): ~11MB/s (bad)
Could it be switch performance issue?
Test3:
physical box is running vSphere Client
I open Summary Storage datastore Browse Datastore... from physical box and upload a file to datastore
Transfer speed (as observed by Windows Task Manager on physical box): ~26-36MB/s (good)
Could it be a vm specific issue?
Test4:
Installed ntttcp to another vm on the same esx server
Measured network performance between vms on the same esx server with NTttcp
Transfer speed (as observed by Windows Task Manager on physical box): ~90-120MB/s (excellent :)
Test5:
I have another esx server on the same site, connecting to the same datastore and same switch. Those two ESX servers have both 2 NICs. One NIC goes to switch while the other goes directly to the other ESX server.
vMotioned one of the testing vms off to the other ESX host
Measured network performance between vms on different esx servers with NTttcp
Transfer speed (as observed by Windows Task Manager on physical box): ~11MB/s (bad)
While I'm aware of these:
ESXi 4.1 slow file transfer
ESXi 5 network performance is slow
Debian Etch and ESXi slow network speeds
VMWare ESXi slow file copy to guest
they did not help (or I must have been missed something)
