I recently inherited a network with 30+ virtual machines. Most, including my trouble server, run as virtual Windows 2008 R2 Standard servers on an ESX5.1 host. The disks are stored in a Lefthand P4000 series SAN with enterprise drives. The file server has 4 data volumes - 4TB, 10 TB, 4TB, and 4 TB presented via iSCSI.
Here are some of the network card configuration settings
- IPv4 Checksum Offload Rx and Tx Enabled
- IPv4 TSO Offload Enabled
- Large Send Offload V2 Enabled
- Offload IP Options Enabled
- Offload TCP Options Enabled
- TCP Checksum Offload RX and TX Enabled
- UDP Checksum Offload RX and TX Enabled
I replaced the E1000 NIC that was originally configured in the virtual file server with vmxnet3, but I cant tell that it made any difference in the long haul.
All of the servers back up over a 1GB P2P network to our hot DR site. Most of the VMs track 70+ MB/s transfer times when there isnt anything else going on the network.
My problem server STARTS out fast, with transfers north of 55 MB/s and consistent network utilization. After a few hours though, performance wanes, and I find the server doing 8-12 MB/s with only heartbeat like blips on the network utilization chart of the task manager.
The appassure server is also a virtual running on Hyper-V 2012 at the DR site, connected via iscsi to some economy storage. Its running 2008 R2 Enterprise with 32GB of RAM and 3 Procs. I had dynamic memory configured for a time, and memory climbed over 50 GB, but I had some other issues with that server because of my inplace upgrade to Enterprise, and had to change it back to non dynamic memory. It just hasnt been reconfigured since then. When I took it over it had only 1 proc, and lol, it was constantly pegged to the point the server and console page were unusable. Im running the latest build of Appasure on the core.
This problem persists even when I drop all other traffic across the P2P link. Im 30 days now without a backup. Im living on network Raid 10 and the prayer that no ones needs a file restored and the building doesnt catch fire. Please, for the of god someone give me some ideas on what I can try.