Hi all,
I've tried quite a lot by now, and I'm still puzzled if I can ever get this to perform well:
Host: 2xXeon 2.6GHz, 4GB RAM, Debian Squeeze, Intel Gigabit Ethernet onboard (e1000)
Guest: Windows XP, 2.5GB RAM
I can not get it to have decent network performance. Here's what I tried:
- 1vCPU/2vCPU -> 1 vCPU performance is slightly better
- flexible/vmxnet/e1000 Adapter -> vmxnet ist best, but very minor differences
- TCP tuning in the Windows Registry -> no effect
Performance varies with the above parameters changed between 100 and 180 MBit/s, which is far too slow I think. Also, guest CPU usage is very high whenever heavy network traffic is on.
For comparison I installed a second VM with Debian Squeeze, without any modification except to install VMware tools I get ~250MBit with pcnet32 and ~350MBit with vmxnet. I suspect that e1000 will perform even better.
I have by now followed about every advice to improve network performance, all to no avail.
I have even tried ESX 3.5 (these are 32bit processors), but the host system has a huge software RAID, which did not perform well at all when re-created in a VM in ESX.
Is this just something I have to live with, or is there another secret trick which I haven't discovered yet?
TIA!
Stefan