Enabling RSS and DRSS to improve performance on Intel icen driver

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi
• VMware NSX

Issue/Introduction

When using inbox icen driver with Intel E800 series NICs (including E810, E825, etc.), users may run into performance bottleneck because of RSS feature is not enabled by default.

Environment

• ESXi 8.x/9.x
• VMware NSX

Cause

The default configuration of disabled RSS is due to the consideration to reduce memory footprint, as RSS queues will reserve more memory.

Resolution

Manually change the module parameter:

# esxcli system module parameters set -m icen -p "RSS=1,1,1... DRSS=4,4,4..."

Additional Information

Performance Best Practices for VMware vSphere 8.0