Extremely slow NAT within a VMWare ESXi host using Linux VMs – A server stack is the collection of software that forms the operational infrastructure on a given machine. In a computing context, a stack is an ordered pile. A server stack is one type of solution stack — an ordered selection of software that makes it possible to complete a particular task. Like in this post about Extremely slow NAT within a VMWare ESXi host using Linux VMs was one problem in server stack that need for a solution. Below are some tips in manage your linux server when you find problem about linux, debian, router, nat, vmware-esxi.
I have a VMWare ESXi host attached to a fast network.
The host runs two virtual machines:
- Gateway
- Client
The gateway has two network interfaces, one that’s bridged to the external network (vSwitch0), and one that’s bridged to the server’s internal network (vSwitch1). It has firehol installed and it’s doing NAT and port forwards for the internal client machine.
The client machine has an internal IP and connects via the gateway to the internet. Everything works well, but transfer speeds from the client to the internet is very slow, less than 30kB/s. Tranfers both to and from the gateway to the internet is fast (100Mbit), and so is traffic from the internet to the client. I’ve tried doing a network dump to see where the problem could be, but didn’t find anything. Everything just looks like the line is slow.
Also, the transfer speed between the two VMs is almost a full gigabit. So that’s not the problem either. Both machines are running Debian Lenny with no special modifications. I’m using open-vm-tools for VMXNET paravirtualized networking.
I found the solution to this problem.
For a completely internal network (that’s not attached to any physical network interface) you need to disable TCP Segmentation Offloading from inside the OS.
It’s a simple command:
ethtool -K <interface> tso off
After this command my transfer speeds went from 30kb/s to full 100Mbit.
Did you try using another type of virtual network card?
The E1000 emulation seems to work pretty good for me, maybe it’s driver based?
