Improve Network Performance by adding more physical NIC ?

[TonyJK]

Hi,

End users complain that one appliation is pretty slow at remote site.

My supervisor suggests adding extra NIC on the Virtual Machine running that application.  However, from the forum, we find that it seems that the right approach should be adding physical NIC to the ESX Host.  Is it correct ?   Should we add more NIC to each ESX Host in the cluster ?

Your advice is sought.

[AndreTheGiant]

More NIC give an overall throughput.

With default team policy each VM use a NIC... so more NICs, more bandwidth.

If you need more bandwidth for a single VM than you need to use the IP hash policy and configure etherchannel on switch side.

Andre

[TonyJK]

Dear Andre,

Since we are not using CISCO Switch, our Network Support Staff prefers not to touch the physical switch.

As you mention, we are using "Route based on the original port ID", we hope adding an addional pNIC can improve the performance.

Thanks

[AWo]

TonyJK schrieb:

Dear Andre,

Since we are not using CISCO Switch, our Network Support Staff prefers not to touch the physical switch.

As you mention, we are using "Route based on the original port ID", we hope adding an addional pNIC can improve the performance.

Thanks

An additional pNIC only helps if you have more guests that pNICs attached to the vSwitch they use. The single vNIC of a guest will be bound to one pNIC when it starts. So all guests gets connected with their vNICS across all pNICS of that particular vSwitch. If you have more guests than pNICs one pNIC might be used by more than one guest so adding a pNIC might lead to less guests per pNIC. But if that applies to the guest in question is questionable and after the next restart that may change.

AWo

[a_p_]

End users complain that one appliation is pretty slow at remote site

What's the bandwidth between the datacenter and the remote site? How are the users accessing the application/data? Is this a typical Client/Server application?

Maybe you need to increase the bandwidth.

André

[Rumple]

Additional nic's will only help if you are actually phyically overloading the physcial network layer.

Have oyu checked with the cisco group to actually see if the utilization of the network port is really high ie, hitting 70+% utilziation during periods of slowdown's?

If not..then network is NOT your problem...

[TonyJK]

Just it is a typical client server application.

Tony

[idle-jam]

it will only make sense if you study the vcenter performance graph on the network (see if it's highly utilized) and then only making decision ..

[TonyJK]

Network Average Usage is 624 kBps with maximum 3717 kBps.

Is it high network utilization ?

Thanks

[idle-jam]

it's about 0.6MBps average and 3.7MBps max. I assumed that you have a gigabit; the theoretical speed for gigabit Ethernet is around 125MB/s and average i do get 30Mbps ++ in my lab. At this number i doubt you need additonal pNIC in terms of performance/bandwidth but more towards availability/failover for teaming.