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DSM 5.0-4482 NanoBoot on ESXi Speed Issue


xeroiv

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I have recently installed XPEnology on my ESXi machine and started using it for my local network storage. Upon switching from a Raid 5 configuration shared on the network by a windows 7 HTPC to this configuration I have noticed a significant drop in transfer speed. I am having trouble figuring out what could be the culprit. Here is my setup:

 

-A Supermicro C2750 with 8 GB of EEC Kingston Ram running an ESXi Server off a USB 2.0 flash drive.

-ESXi server has two VM's running (XPEnology and Windows 2K8).

-I split the resources to each VM from the physical resources so that each runs 4GB ram and 4 vCpus.

-On the XPEnology VM I mapped 4x2TB Samsung F3 Harddrives via RDM.

-The Microserver and Windows 7 x64 client are connected to the same gigabit switch.

-The Windows 7 client target drive is a Samsung SSD.

 

The problem I am having is that when copying from the microserver to the windows 7 local disk I am experiencing lower than expected transfer speeds. My test was just to transfer a very large file from or to the server from the windows 7 client. I tracked the reported average transfer speed from the windows client and the network utilization of both the client and server. One thing of interest that I found was that the network utilization varied wildly during the duration of the transfers.

 

The transfer speed from the server to the windows client ranged from 40 MB/s to 60 MB/s.

 

The transfer speed from the windows client to the server ranged from 50 MB/s to 80 MB/s.

 

Before I converted to this ESXi setup I was getting around 90 MB/s both ways with a smoother transfer. Can anyone offer some advice to help tweak this or at least offer an explanation for the perceived performance decrease that I am having? Also could others post some of their results using a similar setup?

 

My thoughts lead me to believe that it has something to do with the virtualizing the NIC instead of having a direct I/O.

ReadSpeeds.jpg.360e03818f349d1be9ccd1cfe7b356d9.jpg

WriteSpeed.jpg.b4ee06cda738f18fc5b9f3cd326a633b.jpg

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I have a similar setup to yours and noticed the same slower transfer speed in ESXi. I mentioned it in this thread http://xpenology.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=3191. When I have time this weekend I will do some tests under ESXi and see if speed can improve. I think it's a driver issue (setting) with ESXi and I hope to figure it out as ESXi hosts is way easier to manage then Hyper-V Server.

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I saw your post earlier and have been going through the trouble of trying to setup HyperV 2012 R2. Thusfar it has been full of headaches just to get the host up and running. I also have to figure out how to migrate the VMDK properly to VHD files as not to lose my raid.

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I've never tested the transfer speeds under esxi vs non-virtualized, but I know with a windows esxi VM you can choose between 2 different virtual nics (e1000, and VMX3NET). For my windows VM I had to change to VMX3NET or the VM wasn't able to send out multicast/broadcast packets needed for WMC and extenders.

 

Who knows if there is a difference in transfer speeds between the 2, but I figured it would be worth mentioning.

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I ran some further testing with both ESXi and HyperV here are some results that I got. VMX3NET seems to provide higher speeds but still seems a bit erratic with an average upload of 90 MB/s and average download of 60 MB/s. When I used HyperV I got around 50 MB/s both for upload as well as download to the server.

593ef3b23bf3c_VM3NetSpeeds.png.55cd6c1014dbcebc3f7a187c42c7a44d.png

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