Network traffic causes connection to dropout

[mohbandy]

I recently got my hands on a Dell r720XD, installed proxmox on a SSD, and am getting started with an ubuntu and OpenMediaVault VM. OMV I plan to use as my primary NAS, along with docker and a few containers - everything seems to be working as expected.

The issue I am having is now that I have my shared folders created and samba service running I am ready to transfer my data. From my windows machine, I kick off a continuous ping to see how OMV responds. Once I kick off a scp or rsync or drag and drop across samba shares I can instantly see the pings start to take longer and longer until timeout; my web GUI for OMV also stops responding.
The larger the files to transfer, the worse the problem gets. I can transfer gigs of music files and the ping replies hover around 300-800ms. If I transfer a single gigabyte movie file, the pings will start to timeout, but the file will transfer. If I try to stream the video, success depends on the player.

I have tested the disk performance to make sure my raid setup wasn't thrashing about and the results seem reasonable:

# sudo hdparm -Tt /dev/vda
/dev/vda:
Timing cached reads: 18324 MB in 1.99 seconds = 9201.19 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 258 MB in 3.02 seconds = 85.41 MB/sec​

My hunch is that my issue has got to be with the network settings in proxmox and/or how OMV's network is configured.

There are 4 NICs available to proxmox, but the interfaces file looks like:

iface eno1 inet manual

auto vmbr0
iface vmbr0 inet static
address 192.168.1.72
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 192.168.1.1
bridge_ports eno1
bridge_stp off
bridge_fd 0

iface eno2 inet manual

iface eno3 inet manual

iface eno4 inet manual​

I hadn't looked at the network settings in proxmox, but this looks bad. I think I want to dedicate 1 NIC to my OMV vm, preferably pass-through the raw device and install drivers in the VM (as opposed to a virtual bridge to that device). Before traveling down that path, does this approach sound like it would fix my issue or do people think I have other issues?

 

[Richard]

For considering this issue it would be good to have a comprehensive overview about your system. Run

pvereport

and specify which the VM has which role.

Generally speaking: pass-through is experimental, you can give it a try but the normal way to dedicate a physical NIC for a certain VM is rather to assign it to a bridge (e.g. vmbr1) without IP in the host and use is just in the VM.

 

[mohbandy]

I did see that pass-through didn't seem to be officially blessed, but figured it was worth a shot. I will try tonight setting up a dedicated bridge for just my vm 101.

VMs:
100 <-- just a ubuntu 18 vm, haven't really done much with it
101 <-- OMV, this is the guy I'm having this networking issue with

Sorry, newbie to the forums...

 

[shiv sam]

hey,
i was looking for the same issue and came across this thread.. can anyone provide another solution??
thanks in advance.
best regards!!

 

[mohbandy]

I created a dedicated virtual network interface and my problem went away. I also was messing with my network topology so I feel like that is worth mentioning