this is really starting to irritate me, for some reason when a vmware guest tries to communicate with the host, the network switch lights up on the port that the interface bridged to the virtual network is on (and no other port)

AND throughput seems to be consequently limited to 100mbit

1. why is vmware traffic physically traversing the network when the host should exist on the virtual network

2. why is the traffic bounded by the physical network

12/11/2008 5:24:10 PM

ho-hum, it looks like the network driver being compiled in rather than compiled as a module may have been preventing the vmnet driver from being utilized

STAND BY FOR FURTHER UPDATES

12/11/2008 6:08:57 PM

LOL

so a host-only network with the vmnet driver properly utilized is still limited to (less than) 100mbit

AND a host-only network using a e1000 virtual device with the e1000 driver still seems to be limited to (less than) 100mbit, but a bit faster than vmnet

CPU usage of the virtual machine is reported around 100% in the guest regardless of the driver, and 100% of the associated CPU in the host, so it appears that the reason e1000 is marginally faster is because of it's lower CPU utilization

which begs the question: why in the fuck is host-to-guest network I/O so CPU intensive and what can be done

12/11/2008 7:30:45 PM

after further tuning I am now at ~110Mbps avg with e1000 driver and e1000 virtual device

considering this VMware host sustains 100MBps over gigabit to other physical hosts, I am pretty god damned disappointed in VMware right now

this is with VMware Server non-ESX, I just updated the install, tuned some random host, guest, and VMware parameters

12/11/2008 8:50:49 PM

what are you doing that needs that much bandwidth?

12/11/2008 9:01:42 PM

nothing in particular, just tired of having to hop over to the host every time I realize it's going to take 10x as long for a large file operation to complete

my frustration today has been that extracting a DVD image shouldn't take 15 minutes when I know the host can do it in one minute locally

I strongly suspect that jumbo frames would mostly resolve the issue, but thus far neither bridged nor host-only networking seem to actually pass jumbo frames to the host or network, though the e1000 driver allows the mtu to be set guest-side

12/11/2008 9:17:37 PM

this doesn't happen in ESX

no matter what you do, however, you're always going to have to traverse the network if you're going VM to host - the host has no connection to the vswitch.

it's CPU intensive because the CPU is having to both emulate a NIC for the VM and process the traffic coming into the host (if you don't have a TOE) as well as its other CPU duties - that sucks up quite a few clock cycles

what sort of box are you running GSX on? your network throughput is going to be limited to the CPU resources that vmware makes available for NIC virtualization. if all of your clock time is being sucked up by the VMs themselves, there's not much left for the NICs.

12/11/2008 10:15:46 PM

it's a dual socket A system with XP2500+ processors, not exactly monster fast but not in my wildest dreams would I have imagined virtualization overhead would limit it to ~15MB/sec

I'm pretty sure host-only networking doesn't traverse the network, I set up an additional network for the host and VMs and do not see it generating any physical traffic

aside from supporting jumbo frames, what's different in ESX?

12/12/2008 7:49:40 AM

Quote :

"the host has no connection to the vswitch."

not true. the host OS in server can see all the virtual nics. the fact is that vmware server's implementation of bridged networking is a hub rather than a switch so both OS's see the full traffic of the guest OS.

12/12/2008 7:57:14 AM

^that's not how it works in ESX, the host OS can only see the vmkernel ports on a switch - maybe things are different for GSX

12/12/2008 11:35:02 AM

anyone know how to get the /dev/vmnet# up and running in vmware workstation 6.5.1

my error is: Could not open /dev/vmnet0: No such file or directory Failed to connect virtual device Ethernet0.

rhel 5.2 host

there is no vmware-config.pl in this version

ifconfig only shows lo and eth0, none of the vnets

oh and when i click on the virtual network manager in vmware, i get nothing

[Edited on December 19, 2008 at 11:06 AM. Reason : 

12/19/2008 11:03:38 AM

there should be a vmware-config.pl

I would rename /etc/vmware and do a reinstall, particularly if this was an upgrade, 'cause it sounds like that install is corrupt

12/19/2008 11:33:32 AM

fresh install, no upgrade, no vmware-config.pl

12/19/2008 12:01:54 PM

huh, it looks like 6.5.1 may actually not have a vmware-config.pl, but you need to run the vmware binary as root initially, and possibly the following:

vmware-modconfig --console --install-all

12/19/2008 1:12:55 PM

yeah, i did that, and it wont start networking services

12/19/2008 8:22:44 PM

Quote :

" Starting VMware services: Virtual machine monitor [ OK ] Virtual machine communication interface [ OK ] Blocking file system [ OK ] Virtual ethernet [FAILED] Unable to start services "

fuck

12/19/2008 9:02:00 PM

is it loading the vmnet module, is it creating /dev/vmnet* device nodes?

if it's loading the modules but not creating the nodes:

cd /dev
for ((i=0;i<10;i++)); do mknod vmnet$i c 119 $i; done

vmnet-bridge -d /var/run/vmnet-bridge-0.pid /dev/vmnet0 eth0

12/19/2008 10:38:36 PM

no, it hasnt been creating any of the /dev/vmnet# even after restarting

i have been using the MAKEDEV vmnet command to create them with no luck

ill try that other command later

thx

12/19/2008 10:45:38 PM

worked

thx

12/22/2008 12:20:10 PM

lol hacktacular, glad it worked

I am pretty sure it won't save the configuration that way, the init.d script is supposed to parse the config, create the virtual device nodes, and set up NAT / bind the bridges where appropriate in basically the same way

I'd guess the net config is blank or unreadable and that's why it's erroring at the network startup, possibly due to permission issues in /etc/vmware

I have never used 6.5.1, though, and this "no vmware-config.pl" begs the questions "well then where do you configure virtual networks?"

12/22/2008 3:56:22 PM