Wu's Blog

To implement enterprise application like SAP, Oracle or SQL on UCS virtualization environment. Default setting of UCS blades may not suitable for the application. We always expect highest performance by optimize hardware and ESXi. In my UCS training session, I noticed one "hidden" parameter may helpful for performance. Receive Side Scaling – So called RSS, it's a feature that allows you to utilize multiple CPUs and multiple cores per CPU to process the receiving network load. Without RSS, all of the receive network traffic is processed by one CPU and by only one core of the CPU. Essentially, RSS distributes receiving network load to all of the CPUs and their cores. The parameter is an option in BIOS, but it's not under BIOS policy in UCS Manager. You should go to Servers tab, extend Policies node, and check an Eth Adapter Policy under Adapter Policy node, Receive Side Scaling (RSS) is available in Options section of right frame. Blade should be rebooted to lever

Most company use HP, Cisco, IBM network adapter, most of their network adapter drivers include in ESXi 5.x images. But what if your network adapter is other vender? I’m going to show you how to identify and install proper drivers for 3 rd party network adapter on ESXi 5.x. My ESX 4.0 server (HP DL380G7) was working properly for VDI environment. I upgraded the hosts to ESXi 5.x to leverage by new features, but unfortunately 3 rd party network adapter didn’t work after installed ESXi 5.1. vmnic0, 1, 2, 3 belong to embedded HP NIC, vmnic4, 5, 6, 7 disappeared in vSphere Client. I’m going to use vmnic4 for example. Identify network adapter model The additional NICs model shows as ServerEngine Corp. OneConnect 10Gb NIC on vSphere Client. It doesn’t give me more information. The two NICs show Unknown PCI device in BIOS, it indicates not a HP NIC. Search keyword vmnic4 in vmkernel log by command less /var/log/vmkernel | grep vmnic4 , you will see ESXi cannot load the driver. Run command