VxRail using Broadcom BCM57414 NetXtreme-E 10Gb/25Gb RDMA Ethernet Controller cluster vCenter content library slowness.

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:
When vCenter is using VxRail systems on 25 Gb Broadcom BCM57414 NetXtreme-E 10Gb/25Gb RDMA Ethernet Controller with hardware LRO enabled content library transfer performance is slow.

Exporting an item from the published content library would average out at ~1MBps (lows around 150KBps and highs around 9MBps). It does not happen with a datastore browser download or OVF export from outside content library.

Note: This can be between vCenter content library sync task

Cause

Issue is related to hardware LRO

Resolution

This issue is resolved in vCenter Appliance 6.7 Update 3p. 

This is already fixed in vCenter Server Appliance 7.0

Workaround:

You can disable LRO on either vCenter or the hardware.


Disable vCenter LRO 
 

• ethtool -K eth0 lro off

Understanding TCP Segmentation Offload (TSO) and Large Receive Offload (LRO) in a VMware environment

OR

Disable Hardware LRO 

• #esxcfg-module -s disable_tpa=1 bnxtnet

Additional Information

Issue was see on Driver/FW combo

Broadcom BCM57414 NetXtreme-E 10Gb/25Gb RDMA Ethernet Controller

• bnxtnet driver:  216.0.42.4  
• Firmware:         214.4.32.0