Issue 11
© Solarflare Communications 2014
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Solarflare Server Adapter
User Guide
5.9 Performance Tuning on VMware
• Other Considerations...Page 261
Introduction
The Solarflare family of network adapters are designed for high-performance network applications.
The adapter driver is pre-configured with default performance settings that have been designed to
give good performance across a broad class of applications. In many cases, application performance
can be improved by tuning these settings to best suit the application.
There are three metrics that should be considered when tuning an adapter:
• Throughput
• Latency
• CPU utilization
Different applications may be more or less affected by improvements in these three metrics. For
example, transactional (request-response) network applications can be very sensitive to latency
whereas bulk data transfer applications are likely to be more dependent on throughput.
The purpose of this section is to highlight adapter driver settings that affect the performance metrics
described. This guide covers the tuning of all members of the Solarflare family of adapters.
Performance between adapters should be identical, with the exception of latency measurements.
Latency will be affected by the type of physical medium used: CX4, XFP, 10GBase-T or SFP+. This is
because the physical media interface chip (PHY) used on the adapter can introduce additional
latency.
Tuning Settings
Install VMware Tools in the Guest Platform
Installing VMware tools will give greatly improved networking performance in the guest. If VMware
Tools are not installed, ESX emulates a PC-Lance device in the guest. If VMware Tools are installed,
the guest will see a virtual adapter of type vmxnet.
To check that VMware Tools are installed:
1
From the
VMware Infrastructure Client,
power on the virtual machine and click the
Summary
tab.
2
In the
General
panel, check the status of
VMware Tools
.
To install VMware Tools:
1
Power on the virtual machine
2
From the
Inventory > Virtual Machine
menu, select
Install/Upgrade VMware Tools
.