Driver

There is a bug in the tg3 driver on the ESXi hosts (1gbit broadcom cards in the new hosts). If the network card is put under load and netqueue is enabled it will sometimes decide to drop all traffic. Essentially i’ve disabled netqueue and the problems have gone away…. as per this vm kb :

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2035701

The isues will present themselves as log entires like so;

2012-11-19T18:58:52.137Z cpu17:4155)<6>tg3 : vmnic8: RX NetQ allocated on 1 2012-11-19T18:58:52.138Z cpu17:4155)<6>tg3 : vmnic8: NetQ set RX Filter: 1 [00:50:56:71:46:87 0] 2012-11-19T18:58:52.138Z cpu17:4155)<6>tg3 : vmnic7: RX NetQ allocated on 1 2012-11-19T18:58:52.138Z cpu17:4155)<6>tg3 : vmnic7: NetQ set RX Filter: 1 [00:50:56:71:46:87 0] 2012-11-19T18:59:12.139Z cpu21:4155)<6>tg3 : vmnic4: NetQ remove RX filter: 1 2012-11-19T18:59:12.139Z cpu21:4155)<6>tg3 : vmnic4: Free NetQ RX Queue: 1 2012-11-19T18:59:22.137Z cpu24:4155)<6>tg3 : vmnic4: RX NetQ allocated on 1 2012-11-19T18:59:22.138Z cpu24:4155)<6>tg3 : vmnic4: NetQ set RX Filter: 1 [00:50:56:71:46:87 0] 2012-11-19T18:59:42.138Z cpu21:4155)<6>tg3 : vmnic7: NetQ remove RX filter: 1 2012-11-19T18:59:42.138Z cpu21:4155)<6>tg3 : vmnic7: Free NetQ RX Queue: 1 2012-11-19T18:59:42.140Z cpu21:4155)<6>tg3 : vmnic4: NetQ remove RX filter: 1 2012-11-19T18:59:42.140Z cpu21:4155)<6>tg3 : vmnic4: Free NetQ RX Queue: 1 2012-11-19T19:00:02.139Z cpu28:4155)<6>tg3 : vmnic8: NetQ remove RX filter: 1

I’ve found that vmware converter (this may be fixed in newer verions) creates vmware guests with an IDE controller. There can be performance issues if you choose to remain with this particular controller… Best bet is to change it to one of the various vmware SCSI controllers…

Depending on which windows operating system you are running depends on which controller you use….  http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1006621

Guest Operating System	Adapter Type
Windows 2003, 2008, Vista	lsilogic
Windows NT, 2000, XP	buslogic
Linux	lsilogic

 

I’ve got an integrated RTL8111 nic which seemed to work fine under opensolaris 2008.11. But if the nic was put under load for a various length of time it seemed to just drop off the network.

At first i thought it was my SMB service dying, but after a quick ping i relised i had lost the entire TCP/IP stack on that particular card. Hmm…

It does come back online if you are patient and wait for about 5mins or so.