Are you talking about IOMMU or RDM?

Have you play with RDM?
My FreeNAS is using physical RDM off the mobo SATA and a pair of SIL3132 for a total of 10 2TB drives in raidz-2 (well, that's the plan). I've also got a small CF attached to the IDE to store the FreeNAS USB passthru vmdk. I've tested RDM on SIL3232 and works without any issue. It is setup in a way that if it needs to be I can just boot of the FreeNAS USB and not via ESXi in case of mobo failure.

I'm still a little bit miffed why the gigabit is only getting me 20mbps... it will burst to 30mbps... The interesting thing is the PCI (GT) is faster than PCI-e (CT). I'm thinking maybe the router is not fast enough to keep up with and I dont have gigabit swtich handy... but when I do hookup with a gigabit switch, I'll let you know how it goes.

Sorry I didn't reply sooner.

I did try RDM, but couldn't get it to work on my hardware. Not sure if it was a hardware problem or I was just doing something wrong. Didn't fight it too much, but I may in the future. I'd like to find a good controller that works with ESXi that I can use to do RDM to FreeNAS. Would really like to get rid of the underlying vmdk file system under zfs. It's working good like it is, but I plan to look into that more in the future.

What virtual NIC are you using? VMware or E1000? Maybe try swapping vnics to see if that changes anything???

No worry.




I'm using E1000. I've also tested under FreeNAS natively and getting the same consistent low speed of 20MB. Even tho the router is gigabit but the processor on the router may not have enough horse power to fully utiltize the gigabit bandwidth.

I'll have to get a gigabit switch to complete my test which I think it should increase the speed dramatically.

Keeping my fingers crossed.

What type of router are you using? Have you tried a crossover cable between two computers? That should eliminate some if not all of a network congestion, as long as both NICs are of the same quality...

Using Cicso Valet M20 loaded with dd-wrt.

I dont have a crossover cable... yet.

I will argue that Cisco makes THE best network equipment - in their enterprise line. I'm not so impressed with the Linksys line though. It's all I buy when it comes to consumer grade equipment, but I've had issues that may be transparent to the "normal" user. Things like throughput...

Luckily, I have a bunch of enterprise class cisco equipment that I've accumulated over the years from setting up labs for certifications. Big difference in comparing the two.

Anyway, I haven't had any experience with the Valet series, but it wouldn't surprise me if that was your bottleneck. Next I would guess would be your drives, but they should max out at something above 20Mbps.

Try the crossover cable, and keep us posted.

Finally got a gigabit router (ASUS GX-D1081) and burst up to 120mb (not that often). Most of the time it will burst to 90mb and tapers down to 60mb which is not that bad consider that it is in ESXi.

Might be faster if run natively.

Awesome!

TravisT, thank you very much.

Those are respectable numbers. One thing to keep in mind is that the switch/router throughput is measured in Mbps and most software (i.e. Windows) reports transfers in MBps which is Mbps/8. Using that formula, gigabit speeds would be reported by windows as 125MBps. 90MBps is about 70% of gigabit speed and 120MBps is over 95%. You may already know this, but posted anyway in case someone who didn't stumbled across this.

Glad it's working better for you now.