
Virtual Machine Network Interfaces
I've searched around but can't find anything other than the 1GbE virtual NICs.
I don't currently have unRAID installed anywhere, I'm about to do a big upgrade.
I'm planning for 2x 25GbE bonded nics on the host then to have some 10G vNICs for VMs inside the machine. Can anyone point me in the direction of if there are any faster vNICs avaliable in unRAID other than the 1GbE versions.
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The virtio_net driver that Unraid uses for virtual machines does not have any link speed and will send and receive data as fast as the host machine can handle.
Thanks for that, it's been a long time since I ran a unRAID box and I want to get this right, If I create a new VM and would like it to be able to communicate with All other VMs on a vSwitch (sorry I speak windows server more than Linux) as fast as possible.
Does the virtio network interface show up in windows as 1G?
How does windows know what speed the NIC is?
Which virtual nic is fastest? I'm guessing not the E1000 as that's an emulated 1G and VMXNET3 is a 10Gig
What happens if my hardware can support faster than 10G virtualized throughput does the vNIC bottleneck it or does some magic happen and it becomes a "virtual" Limit?
Sorry for the stupid questions, I've been trying to find this stuff out for a while, I understand that these might be stupid questions. I've spent a good while looking for answers on this and found nothing so far.
Excerpt taken from "https://ssh.guru/e1000-vs-vmxnet3-replacing-vnic/"
Speaking of E1000, it is a software emulation of a 1 GB network card, commonly available on Intel-based devices and most operating systems include built-in support. Because of that, there is no special driver required to make it operate in a virtual environment. The problem is that the virtual device is just as described, a piece of software acting as if it was hardware. That can lead to performance issues as the host’s CPU is required to take care of the processing normally done on a separate ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit).
VMware definition:
An emulated version of the Intel 82545EM Gigabit Ethernet NIC. A driver for this NIC is not included with all guest operating systems. Typically Linux versions 2.4.19 and later, Windows XP Professional x64 Edition and later, and Windows Server 2003 (32-bit) and later include the E1000 driver.
On the other hand, we’ve got VMXNET3 virtual NIC, which is a completely virtualized 10 GB NIC with drivers and network processing are integrated with the ESXi hypervisor. That means there is no additional processing required to emulate a hardware device and network performance is much better. There is no native VMXNET device driver in some operating systems such as Windows 2008 R2 and RedHat/CentOS 5 so VMware Tools is required to obtain the driver.
VMware definition:
The VMXNET virtual network adapter has no physical counterpart. VMXNET is optimized for performance in a virtual machine. Because operating system vendors do not provide built-in drivers for this card, you must install VMware Tools to have a driver for the VMXNET network adapter available.