How to increase the number of queues for RSS on Mellanox adapter

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

On ESXi hosts using Mellanox adapters, administrators may observe that the default number of Receive Side Scaling (RSS) queues is limited and does not fully utilize the available CPU cores.

Increasing the number of RSS queues allows network traffic to be distributed more evenly across multiple CPU cores, thereby improving throughput, reducing latency, and enhancing overall system performance.

Environment

VMware ESXi

Resolution

From the ESXi host CLI, log in with root credentials and run the following command:

vmkload_mod nmlx5_core RSS=16 max_queues=36