Low (network) transfer speeds on Dell PowerEdge T610

[PeterZ]

Hi all

I have installed Proxmox on the above mentioned server (tower)
The transfer speeds from/to the server (samba share on a container) are VERY low, about 1MB/sec.
Is there anything special that I have to do to get reasonable speeds?
All discs are original, I think 15K SAS drives.

I just did a test to transfer from the samba share to a Win VM machine with SFTP and get about 15MB/sec.
Discs are configured as raidz pools 2 by 2

Any idea what might be wrong?
TIA
Peter

 

[wolfgang]

Hi,

it is hard to say what the problem is, there are many parts that are involved in this.
Did you just benchmark the network?
iperf or qperf is a good tool for this.

 

[PeterZ]

Hi Wolfgang, thanks for your reply.

There are no other issues on the network, there are a lot of devices - mostly wired - and all works fine within expected results.
The test I did was of course from another machine so the transfer was over the network, back and forth, on the server.

Now I tested it with 'pv' and copied a +4GB file from one pool to another => 4.65GiB 0:00:20 [ 232MiB/s]
So that seems to be OK, so can I conclude that it has to do with networking?

The system has 2 nic's; do you - or anyone else - have a better understanding how they operate?
The docs state:

One dual-port embedded Broadcom® NetXtreme® II 5709c GigabitEthernet NIC with failover and load balancing

Is there anything particular that I have to do for Proxmox VE?
One of the NIC's is active without any special settings and 1 bridge is configured.

TIA
Peter

 

[PeterZ]

Nobody?

I'm considering bonding them together, the switch is a Netgear GS116E (so managed) but never done such a thing before.
Would that be a good option?

If yes, a few questions:
1) Is it still advisable to use IEEE 802.3ad?
2) Will I lose connectivity to the server? (it runs headless and not easy to reach, so have to take precautions then)
3) Any other advice?

TIA
Peter

 

[wolfgang]

If the network is ok then you must test the storage and the smbconfig.

I have done a quick look at the manual of the GS116E and it does not support LAG(Bonds).
So you can only use active-backup as bond mode.

 

[PeterZ]

Thanks for your efforts Wolfgang!

Lucky me: it's a GS116Ev2, so all the options are still open and my questions still stand.

I also tried to bring up the 2nd NIC but I cannot to get it working.
Is there something particular that I have to do?
I assigned a unique IP to it and restarted the server.
When I ping this address, I get a reply as long as the 1st NIC is connected to the network.
Changed the patch cables to be sure, same result though

 

[bobmc]

Bonding is very unlikely to solve your issues.

It would help if you could share some information about how you have configured networking in the Proxmox host (cat /etc/network/interfaces)

Also where are the samba shares located - on the container or mapped to the zfs pool on the host? If the samba shares are on the proxmox host why not run samba on the host itself?

In my personal setup, samba shares are on the proxmox host and any containers that need access for services (plex, transmission, minim, etc) have mapped zfs-datasets as required. Data transfers between VM's run at better than line speed (they're operating at a notional 10G so the limitations are in the disk system) and VM's to Physical device transfers run at close to 1G

 

[PeterZ]

Somehow, the speed of that 1st NIC is normal now, don't understand what caused this since 'nothing' ( except rebooting, swapping cables/ports & installing updates) has changed on the config.
Transfer speeds are at expected level, so that's the most important but I'm still curious what could have been wrong...

I still cannot get the 2nd NIC to function though, any help is highly appreciated.
cat /etc/network/interfaces gives:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

iface eno1 inet manual

iface eno2 inet manual

auto vmbr0
iface vmbr0 inet static
        address 192.168.1.100/24
        gateway 192.168.1.1
        bridge-ports eno1
        bridge-stp off
        bridge-fd 0

auto vmbr1
iface vmbr1 inet static
        address 192.168.1.101/24
        bridge-ports eno2
        bridge-stp off
        bridge-fd 0

EDIT: (except rebooting, swapping cables/ports & installing updates)