Description:

10 Gigabit Ethernet is expected to replace Gigabit Ethernet and becomethe dominant Ethernet standard in the next few years. VMware ESX nowsupports a number of 10 Gbps network cards and allows multiple virtualmachines to share a single physical NIC. This paper presents resultsfrom our single-virtual machine and multi-virtual machine networkthroughput experiments that show ESX can easily reach line rates on 10Gbps links. The paper discusses how Jumbo Frames influence networkingperformance, both on the receive and the transmit paths. The paper alsopresents the results of our scalability experiments in which up to 16virtual machines share a single 10 Gbps physical NIC and discusses theallocation of bandwidth to different virtual machines.