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Jumbo Frames VMX 7.1 with Hyper-V

ben_g

Hi all,

I have recently installed a fresh copy of VMX 7.1.

We have 4 x Hyper-V 2012 hosts (failover cluster) with slightly converged networking (40Gb Mellanox) for LM, CSV and Mgmt VLANS with dedicated iSCSI 10Gb NICs which connect to a p4500G2 and a 3PAR 8200 (AFA) (both units have dedicated 10Gbe NICS for iSCSI) via a Mellanox switch to enable MPIO.

We recently purchased a StoreOnce 3520 (10Gbe installed) and so purchased VMX to pair with it for our backup solution.

Anyway, I've setup a Guest VM to run VMX (sitting on the Hyper-v cluster) and I have been able to set everything up successfully, I have even been able to get 3PAR hardware snapshots working on the VV's (CSVs).

The problem I am having is related to speed.

I have setup a VLAN just for "SMB" traffic between hosts, a StoreEasy unit and now the StoreOnce. Eash Hyper-v Host has a virtual NIC on this VLAN with the Storeonce having it's data NIC's dedicated on this vlan.

With the Guest VM running VMX I have setup 2 vNIC's. One which connects to our management network (aka Management VLAN) and another which connects to the SMB VLAN. When I run a backup job I can see data coming into the VMX guest via the Management VLAN NIC @ ~300-1,000Mbps and going out (towards the StoreOnce) on the SMB VLAN @ ~100-500Mbps which makes sense as I assume the VMX Guest is going compression/dedupe etc? (I view the speed via taskmgr/ResMon)

Even though everything seems to work, I think anything less than 2-5Gbps is quite slow considering the hosts have 40Gbs NICs, iSCSI is 10Gbs and the StoreOnce is 10Gbs.

I tried enabling Jumbo Frames on the vNIC attached to the VMX Guest because the rest of the SMB VLAN fabric has it enabled (HV Hosts, StoreOnce, Switch etc) and I can ping each endpoint successfully using jumbo packets but when I run a backup job the data transfer is intemittent and still slow. I see the same transfer speeds via TaskManager/ResMon but every 10-20seconds the data transfer will drop to 0 bps for 2-3 seconds and then resume.

I turn jumbo frames back off on the VMX Guest vNIC and the speed it back to a smooth 800-1,000Mbps.

I was wondering if there is some issue with the VMX software processing jumbo frames? Is it supported?

Also, none of the VM's being backed up run concurrently. Is there something I need to do to enable this? It appears only one VM is backed up at a time and there is exactly 10 seconds in between each backup.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Cheers,

Ben

  • 0

    Hi All,

    An update and correction. I had setup the VMX to communicate to the HV Hosts and StoreOnce via the SMB vLAN exclusively (I had to use the hosts file to force connection to the HV hosts via SMB vlan) which I didn't mention previously. That way traffic is flowing in an out of the VMX Guest via the SMB vNIC only.

    I ran another backup overnight and it's still running (10 hours later) with plenty of time still to go.

    I've attached an image of the scheduled task details and have circled the first VM that has been backed up (it's the 3rd time being backed, 1st was full and and now it's 2nd incremental) showing a transfer rate of 15Mbps for ~200GBs which is extremely slow.

    Do i need to add more resources to the VMX guest as CPU usage is ~50% during the backup but memory is barely touched (<2GBs)?

    All the VM's being backed up reside on the 3PAR which is all flash.

    We'll have to revert to our previous software (Altaro) if this speed cannot be improved, we can't have backups running for 10 hours (there's still another 3 VM's to backup) when the same backups previously took only 4-5 hours.

    Cheers,

    Ben

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