High rate of dropped packets for guests using E1000 or E1000E virtual network adapter on the same ESXi 5.x host

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:
For guests running on an ESXi 5.x host under all of these conditions:

• All guest are running on the same ESXi 5.x host.
• The guests are running on the same vSwitch or dvSwitch on the same host.
• The guests are using the E1000 or the E1000E virtual network adapter.
• A number of packets higher than the MTU is being generated inside the guests due to heavy traffic or network testing.
• There are no I/O resource contention issues.

You experience this symptom:

• Running the esxtop command reports a high rate of received packets being dropped (%DRPRX) in the networking view for guests on the ESXi 5.x host

Note: If all of these conditions do not match your environment, your issue is not related to this article. Search for your symptoms in the VMware Knowledge Base or file a Support Request. For more information, see Filing a Support Request in Customer Connect (2006985).

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 5.1
VMware vSphere ESXi 5.0
VMware vSphere ESXi 5.5

Cause

This issue occurs due to a miscalculation of the received packet count within the vSwitch. The drops are noticed due to fragmentation when packets larger than the configured MTU in the guest OS are sent through the E1000 virtual network adapter. The fragmented chunks are erroneously reported as dropped in esxtop.

Resolution

This is a known issue affecting ESXi 5.0.

This issue is resolved in:

• ESXi 5.5 Update 1, available at VMware Downloads. For more information, see the ESXi 5.1 Update 2 Release Notes.
• ESXi 5.1 Update 2, available at VMware Downloads. For more information, see the ESXi 5.1 Update 2 Release Notes.

To work around this issue, use a network adapter other than the E1000 for the guest operating system. For restrictions and more information on what adapter to use, see Choosing a network adapter for your virtual machine (1001805).

Additional Information

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For more information on a related issue, see The output of esxtop shows dropped receive packets at the virtual switch (1010071).

Choosing a network adapter for your virtual machine
The output of esxtop show dropped receive packets at the virtual switch
同じ ESXi 5.x ホスト上で E1000 または E1000E 仮想ネットワーク アダプタを使用するゲストの場合ドロップされるパケットの率が高い
同一 ESXi 5.x 主机上使用 E1000 或 E1000E 虚拟网络适配器的客户机的丢包率非常高