Hi,
I'm trying to get some good iSCSI performance between my two nested ESXi VMs and my physical HP Microserver Gen8 running Windows Server 2012 R2.
Here's the current setup:
- 1 x Dell PowerEdge T710 ESXi host
- 1 x HP Microserver Gen8 (offering up iSCSI)
- Dell and HP hosts have 2 x Emulex OCe10102 10GbE card
- All 10GbE NICs are connected using a Force10 cable (basically a cross-over cable) as there are only two physical hosts
- 2 x nested ESXi VMs with eight NICs (2 x management, 2 x iSCSI, 1 x NFS, 3 x nested guest VM traffic)
- Promiscuous mode and forged transmits enabled on each port group that offers traffic to nested guests
- ESXi Mac Learning dvFilter VMware fling installed on host
- 2 advanced options per vNIC, per nested ESXi for the Mac Learning dvFilter
- Chap is disabled
- Host has a vSwitch with both 10GbE adapters assigned as active, with two port groups
- Port group Nested_iSCSI1 has one 10GbE adapter active, the other unused
- Port group Nested_iSCSI2 has the other 10GbE adapter set to active, the other unused
- All ESXi hosts and guests are running 5.5 U2 build 2718055
- All ESXi nested guests are hardware version 10 and were created using the Web Client
- HP storage box is running Windows Server 2012 R2
The nested VMs can see the iSCSI LUNs, create/browse datastores etc without issue. It's just the performance is terrible. For example:
- Copy a 4.2GB ISO from a nested ESXi guest to VMFS-formatted iSCSI LUN - 43 minutes (screenshot attached)
- Copy a 4.2GB ISO from a Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 3 guest to NTFS-formatted LUN - 8 seconds (screenshot also attached)
Even allowing for some differences between VMFS and NTFS... that's a heck of a difference!
Here's what I've tried:
- Changing the nested VMs NICs from E1000 and E1000E, then again to VMXNET3.
- vSwitches and dvSwitches for the iSCSI NICs on the guests
- Setting the MTU to both 1500 and 9000 (currently it's back at 1500)
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Many thanks,
-Mark