I have installed ESXi 5.1 on a HP N40L Microserver and run FreeNAS 8.3 as a client inside.
This works fine but I only get about 30-40 MByte/s read and write from my Desktop PC. At first I thought this was normal because of the extra virtualization layer and because the HP N40L is not exactly the fastest machine.
However: when I install a virtual Ubuntu Server I can read and write with 60/70MByte/s. Clearly ESXi/ the hardware/ my cabling is not the problem.
Next I started testing the network speed with iperf and that explains it all
The Ubuntu server can saturate my gigabit network, FreeNAS stops at 40%
Note: I also tested NAS4Free, a plain FreeBSD installation and ZFSGuru and they are all equally slow. An XP windows client is fast like Ubuntu.
Why is FreeNAS so limited? Is this just because I must use the e1000 driver in stead of the VMXNET3? Would the VMXNET3 be three times as fast?
This works fine but I only get about 30-40 MByte/s read and write from my Desktop PC. At first I thought this was normal because of the extra virtualization layer and because the HP N40L is not exactly the fastest machine.
However: when I install a virtual Ubuntu Server I can read and write with 60/70MByte/s. Clearly ESXi/ the hardware/ my cabling is not the problem.
Next I started testing the network speed with iperf and that explains it all
Code:
Ubuntu Server (1GB memory assigned): iperf -c 192.168.5.122 -w 256K -i 1 -f M [108] 0.0-10.0 sec 1093 MBytes 109 MBytes/sec FreeNAS Server (4GB memory assigned): iperf -c 192.168.5.121 -w 256K -i 1 -f M [108] 0.0-10.0 sec 422 MBytes 42.0 MBytes/sec
The Ubuntu server can saturate my gigabit network, FreeNAS stops at 40%
Note: I also tested NAS4Free, a plain FreeBSD installation and ZFSGuru and they are all equally slow. An XP windows client is fast like Ubuntu.
Why is FreeNAS so limited? Is this just because I must use the e1000 driver in stead of the VMXNET3? Would the VMXNET3 be three times as fast?