VMXNET3, the newest generation of virtual network adapter from VMware, offers performance on par with or better than its previous generations in both Windows and Linux guests. Both the driver and the device have been highly tuned to perform better on modern systems. Furthermore, VMXNET3 introduces new features and enhancements, such as TSO6 and RSS.
TSO6 makes it especially useful for users deploying applications that deal with IPv6 traffic, while RSS is helpful for deployments requiring high scalability. All these features give VMXNET3 advantages that are not possible with previous generations of virtual network adapters.
Moving forward, to keep pace with an ever‐increasing demand for network bandwidth, Vmware recommend customers migrate to VMXNET3 if performance is of top concern to their deployments.
The VMXNET3 driver is NAPI‐compliant on Linux guests. NAPI is an interrupt mitigation mechanism that improves high‐speed networking performance on Linux by switching back and forth between interrupt mode and polling mode during packet receive. It is a proven technique to improve CPU efficiency and allows the
guest to process higher packet loads. VMXNET3 also supports Large Receive Offload (LRO) on Linux guests.However, in ESX 4.0 the VMkernel backend supports large receive packets only if the packets originate from another virtual machine running on the same host.
VMXNET3 supports larger Tx/Rx ring buffer sizes compared to previous generations of virtual network devices. This feature benefits certain network workloads with bursty and high‐peak throughput. Having a larger ring size provides extra buffering to better cope with transient packet bursts.
VMXNET3 supports three interrupt modes:
MSI‐X,
MSI, and
INTx.
Normally the VMXNET3 guest driver will attempt to use the interrupt modes in the order given above, if the guest kernel supports them. With VMXNET3, TCP Segmentation Offload (TSO) for IPv6 is supported for both Windows and Linux guests now, and TSO support for IPv4 is added for Solaris guests in addition to Windows and Linux guests.
To use VMXNET3, the user must install VMware Tools on a virtual machine with hardware version 7.
NAPI ("New API") is a modification to the device driver packet processing framework, which is designed to improve the performance of high-speed networking. NAPI works through:
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High-speed networking can create thousands of interrupts per second, all of which tell the system something it already knew: it has lots of packets to process. NAPI allows drivers to run with (some) interrupts disabled during times of high traffic, with a corresponding decrease in system load.
Packet throttling
When the system is overwhelmed and must drop packets, it's better if those packets are disposed of before much effort goes into processing them. NAPI-compliant drivers can often cause packets to be dropped in the network adaptor itself, before the kernel sees them at all.
NAPI was first incorporated in the 2.5/2.6 kernel but was also backported to the 2.4.20 kernel.
Note that use of NAPI is entirely optional, drivers will work just fine (though perhaps a little more slowly) without it.
A driver may continue using the old 2.4 technique for interfacing to the network stack and not benefit from the NAPI changes. NAPI additions to the kernel do not break backward compatibility.
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