mellanox connectx 2 windows - esxi

[John Doe]

hi folks,

i have a mellanox connectx-2 card in my windows 10 desktop, conncected via cisco sfp copper cable to my esxi machine with again mellanox connectx-2

running iperf3 gives me about 3 - 3.9 gbits instead of close to 10.
a cpu bottleneck seems unlikely


I have tried mtu = 9000 on the windows machine
different cisco cable
different pcie slots
latest mellonox driver on winodws machine

i am running out of ideas where i can check further.
Any help?

 

[danb35]

I'm trying to figure out what your question has to do with TrueNAS--much less with TrueNAS running as a virtual machine--and I've got nothing. Can you explain?

 

[John Doe]

ah yes, thats easy. both are in some kind of grey metal box with some black cables leading to a wall socket in my living room.

hope that helps with my question

 

[danb35]

hope that helps with my question

Not in the least, but I think you know that. Good luck.

 

[Scharbag]

I really like this forum section - I hope that people stop posting drivel like this here or the admins will likely take away our new toy.

:|

 

[John Doe]

i think we are here to help each other. many of us having the same hardware and many of us using the same software for vaious projects.

so why not align with others in a sub forum.
Of course my answer was rubbish but do we need to ask such picky questions instead of just helping each others (or remain silent)?
we are all enthusiasts looking at the registration date and probably everyone of us got stuck from time to time with IT stuff.

And as you might have done as well, you ask where you think you get the best answers.

in case I cannot contribute to something I just remain silent.

 

[Scharbag]

i think we are here to help each other. many of us having the same hardware and many of us using the same software for vaious projects.

so why not align with others in a sub forum.
Of course my answer was rubbish but do we need to ask such picky questions instead of just helping each others (or remain silent)?
we are all enthusiasts looking at the registration date and probably everyone of us got stuck from time to time with IT stuff.

And as you might have done as well, you ask where you think you get the best answers.

in case I cannot contribute to something I just remain silent.

Don't expect to ask how to tune your lawnmower on a BMW car forum without expecting to get flamed. Lots of BMW owners likely have a lawnmower, but lawnmower maintenance questions have their own forums.

There is an entire section for hardware in the General Help forum on this site. Perhaps that would be a better location to ask pure hardware questions.

 

[danb35]

...or there's an off-topic subforum for questions that are, well, off-topic. Or you can post in a place that has nothing at all to do with the question, and whine when people call you out on it. Ah well, one more for my ignore list.

 

[John Doe]

in case someone has the same issue,

solution found here:

SOLVED - 10GbE ESXi 6.5 VMXNET 3 performance is poor with iperf3 tests.

Hi all, I have been doing some testing with iperf3 and FreeNAS running as a VM in ESXi 6.5 and have found that 10Gbe networking to be poor. I have kept it simple and kept FreeNAS and a CentOS 7 VM on the same host to take any issues with switches and cabling out of the picture. Everything is...

www.truenas.com

I have solved my problem and can confirm that there is nothing wrong with the VMXNET 3 drivers in FreeBSD 11 and by extension FreeNAS 11. I'm running FreeNAS-11.1-U2 as a VM on ESXi 6.5U1 with the HBA passed through to the VM. The server has an Intel X520-DA2 NIC which supports TSO and LRO. If a NIC supports TSO and LRO ESXi will automatically enable these functions, you can find out if they are enabled by following the instructions here Managing Network Resources. I all ready new that the virtual and physical networks where configured correctly because of iperf testing showed expected speeds so the issue had to be with FreeNAS settings. I added the various turnings found in the forums which made no difference. I then went to Network-->Interfaces-->vmx0-->Edit and added tso lro into the options box and hit save. Bam, 10GbE is now working as it should. Just to be clear the bellow results are from a default install of FreeNAS with no turnings and just TSO and LRO enabled. List of available settings that can be put into the NIC options box can be found here.