VMXNET3?

[TXAG26]

I know this comes up every now and again, but are there any plans to include VMWare Tools or the VMXNET3 driver in FreeNAS 9.3?

I don't want to start a discussion of the pros/cons of virtualizing FreeNAS, but for those of us who do it correctly with the proper hardware, the VMXNET3 NIC is the only way to get faster than 1gb network connections between virtual machines on the same physical server. The VMXNET3 NIC also generally has less overhead compared to other options.

FWIW, I just installed FreeNAS 9.3-BETA and everything looks good so far, so adding support for the VMXNET3 NIC would be the icing on the cake!

 

[jgreco]

Really? There's nothing in the em driver that would limit it as far as I can tell, and in the past when I've done comparison testing, sometimes the em driver is actually faster.



There, with just the default crapass window size, near 2Gbps with em.

 

[cyberjock]

No. If you read the feature request tickets this isn't easily possible because the 5.0, 5.1, and 5.5 don't necessarily use the same driver. So you either don't include it or you bone two of the three groups. So it's not included by default because:

1. The current em drivers work just fine
2. You really shouldn't be virutalizing anyway
3. If you *really* just gotta have it, there's a driver in the forums that you can use for the 9.2.1.x. The driver likely won't work on 9.3, but I'm sure someone will provide the 9.3 driver when the time comes.

 

[jgreco]

and for whatever reason the hypervisor I ran that on was running 80% busy when I did it. I got 2.36Gbits/sec after migrating it to a less-busy box.