Hey everybody,
I've been poking around a lot trying to figure out a solution to the situation I am currently seeing in my network.
Scenario:
So for a while, I've noticed that my network is fairly "slow" by comparison to other networks I've worked on in the past. It wasn't brutal slow, but there was definitely a noticeable difference. Whenever I would transfer files between virtual servers, I noticed things were taking a while. CIFS/SMB transfers were only going at like 15mb/s on VMs that were located on the same vSwitch. The vSwitch was set to 10Gbps and so were the clients, so you can imagine I thought some things were pretty weird. All VMs are using VMXNET3 adapters. I initially started troubleshooting down the "this is clearly a VMware issue" so I read some articles made some changes, and still no change in network transfer speed.
After beating my head against the wall for the better part of a week, I noticed that two test boxes I have setup in my DEV environment actually had pretty high transfer rates. I immediately started looking at these boxes. Same ESXi revisions, same VM versions, same VMXNET3 drivers... same everything. Then I realized, that SEP wasn't on these two VMs (one is an XP VM the other is a Win7 VM). So I dropped SEP (full client install) on both of them and saw the network performance drastically decrease. So I found the problem. Initially my Dev environment was running 12.1.2. I read through some articles and realized that there was a known performance issue with 12.1.2. I went ahead and did an inline update of my SEPM and redeployed 12.1.3 to these two clients I was using to test, again with a full client installation. A little better performance, but not much. I started stripping pieces of SEP out eventually getting down to just the basic A/V options and I was still seeing some pretty poor network performance rates.
I then began trying to identify where the performance issues were coming from. I uninstalled SEP completely from the XP VM and left it on the Win7 VM. Here's what I observed:
- Sending from the XP VM (no SEP) to the Win7 VM (SEP only A/V, enabled) 300-600 mbit/s
- Sending from the Win7 VM (SEP only A/V, enabled) to the XP VM (no SEP) 1.3 - 1.7 gbit/s.
- Sending from the XP VM (no SEP) to the Win7 VM (SEP only A/V, disabled) 1.1 - 1.2 gbit/s
- Sending from the Win7 VM (SEP only A/V, disabled) to the XP VM (No SEP) 1.2 - 1.5 gbit/s
Granted there are some differences in send/receive in the various tests that are minor, the biggest observation is that it appears that SEP with only the A/V component installed (no sonar/no network threat protection) seems to limit the performance of the received traffic when the client has the app enabled.
Sooo... here are my questions:
- Has anyone else experienced this or is it just me?
- Did I miss some really important documentation somewhere (seems like I may have)?
- Does anyone have some suggestions I can try?
Thanks for reading this wall of text and I appreciate any help that can be offered!