All, I've been playing with DPDK recently on a variety of bare metal Linux installations and so far and have seen wonderful improvements in performance on both our Westmere and Sandy Bridge based servers.
However when I install ESXi 5.1 (not linked to a vSphere management system -- stand alone ESXi installation) on one of the Westmere systems and use vmxnet3-usermap with the standard VMWare vSwitch my performance drops way down. Does anyone have a sense of pps/bps I can realistically expect to see from vmxnet3-usermap without doing SR-IOV/passthrough? Raw CentOS and RHEL 6.4 we're seeing 14.88Mpps/10Gbps but going to ESXi running CentOS 6.4 we're seeing 500Kpps/4Gbps. Is that reasonable (obviously packet rate is with small packets and data rate is with larger packets). Without going to SR-IOV is there anything that I can do to improve this performance in vmware? Also, I know SR-IOV breaks many of the HA/auto balancing features of VMware. Is the same true with vmxnet3-usermap or is that safe to use with VMs floating around a cluster willy-nilly? Thanks, Stefan
