Enabling Jumbo Frames on VMXNET3 adapter in Windows Server 2012

Question

Hi to everyone on the wonderful Equallogic forums :)

We have an EQL PS4100X running VM's on vSphere 5.1. Everything is working great and we're about to migrate our main production database to a SQL 2012 VM. I've been doing some research on whether we should enable jumbo frames on the VMXNET3 adapter in the VM.

From reading this white paper it seems there are major performance advantages to enabling jumbo frames and some other options within the NIC settings:

http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/extras/m/white_papers/20403565.aspx

Just curious as to what other people do and if they've seen any improvement in performance. Anyone had any experience with this ?

Thanks

Lee

leeb_russell · Answer

Sorry, should have mentioned we have 2 stacked DELL Powerconnect 6224 switches!

Thanks very much for the info Don. I'll check out the best practices document and may tinker with Jumbo frames down the line.

Cheers

Lee

leeb_russell · Answer

Thanks for the info. We're not on the latest firmware. I'm a bit wary of updating the firmware on the switches in case the config is lost, but I know we have a backup of it. The switches were configured by DELL engineers who created a VLAN for the iSCSI connections. Interesting about the MTU. It's been configured to 9000 on the switch. Should it be 9216 on just the switch ? Should we set it to 9216 on the ESXi hosts as well ?

leeb_russell · Answer

Thanks Don, makes sense.

EqualLogic

Enabling Jumbo Frames on VMXNET3 adapter in Windows Server 2012

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