Slow drive transfer speeds/network transfer on my Microserver virtual host (ESXi)

DJMK4

DJMK4

DJMK4

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Does anyone know why I have some slow transfer speeds on my Microserver?

Basically at the moment I have ESXi 5.0 installed and running on a USB memory stick on the motherboard, then 2 x HDD's

1 x 250GB (Datastore1) - For storage of the VM's
1 x 500GB (Datastore2) - Data storage

I have a couple of VM's, one of them a Windows 2008 R2 server VM, one other FreeNAS amongst a few others (not relevant at this stage)

The VM's are stored on Datastore1, I basically allocated the 500GB datastore to FreeNAS, for obvious reasons (network storage)

My other VM's connect to these shares via a mapped network drive, however, when transferring data across from one of my Windows VM's to this Freenas VM network drive, I am only getting around 4MB/s

Is this a limitation somewhere on my Virtual host, or is it something on the Microserver causing this bottleneck?

Its not only that, there are some elements of poor speeds when transferring to/from drives on the Microserver also.

Can anyone help me get around this? boost the speed from my Virtual host to and from disks, and to and from the FreeNAS set-up thats also hosted on my Microserver, could the slow transfer over the network be because I am using a single network adaptor, rather than a dedicated NIC with 4 x ports to use with each VM?
 
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I too am getting slowness internally for my VMs and from the lan inwards. Interested to hear other peoples thoughts on it.

Running same as OP although using a USB drive for ESXI
 
What vNICs are you using? What NICs? What switches etc? Duplex and negotiated link speeds all OK?

I have had transfer speed issues between Windows and BSD-based filers in the past and in some cases it has been down to TCP window scaling and so on but there are things to check on the network first. When I was messing around with really pushing the performance of some server stuff back when I was in Uni we discovered that for some reason the little Netgear gigabit switches we were using were to blame although we never got to the bottom of why!
 
This is the thing. It's not directly going over physical Ethernet medium between the source machine and destination machine

I have one host, esxi is installed on and booted from a usb stick on the motherboard, The machine is a hp microserver using the standard onboard NIC, 8gb memory and whilst im waiting for some bigger drives there is

250gb datastore1 this is only used for storing the virtual machines enough space for each machine to comfortably run the os

500GB datastore2 this datastore has been created so to assign to freenas as a volume, to which in can create shares on. This is where the bottle neck over network seems to be happening, when I transfer say a big file from my windows 2008 VM (which is a VM residing in the first datastore) to the freenas volume (datastore2)

I have read a few comments here and there about transfer speeds being a bit iffy in VM and from the microserver itself.

But i am not sure where the 4MB/s bottleneck was coming from, disk or network? Or both.

I want to hear of people's experiences of something similar and how to rectify, also if its worth adding a NIC card with multiple ports so i can assign a VM a dedicated port rather than everything sharing the onboard Microserver NIC
 
4MB/s is a bit low even for the slowest of disks. It should be quicker...

Try turning off all TCP Checksum offloading and make sure you have the correct drivers installed/vmware tools is up to date.
 
Maximum I could get with ESXI was 70mbs that was with Raid 5 of 4 drives capable of 200+. A tip I had to make sure the adapters were set to 1GB physically rather than auto negotiate.
 
There is a bios setting in the hp which really helped my speeds (same setup as you). Can't recall the name of the setting off hand.
 
Uhtred said:
There is a bios setting in the hp which really helped my speeds (same setup as you). Can't recall the name of the setting off hand.
Click to expand...

Excellent, I will have a ganders :)

Dont have a RAID setup on this

Will also try "Try turning off all TCP Checksum offloading and make sure you have the correct drivers installed/vmware tools is up to date"

let you know how I get on
 
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