Bandwidth testing between ESXi hosts

I know I haven’t written on my blog in over a year, but I’m hoping to reconnect with you on a more frequent basis. Now that I’m in a Pre-Sales role with Oracle, my primary functions are centered around Oracle Cloud VMware Solution.

I ran into an issue with Network performance and what we believed to be VMware HCX. In order to help pinpoint the bottleneck, I helped the Customer run some performance benchmarks. Many VMware admins might not know that iPerf comes pre-installed with ESXi since 6.5u2, which is the version I’m working with today.

I wasn’t able to start iPerf in server mode without first making a copy of it, so here’s the command to do that.

# Copy iPerf3 | Cannot start listener without this
cp /usr/lib/vmware/vsan/bin/iperf3 /usr/lib/vmware/vsan/bin/iperf3.copy

Next you’ll want to disable the ESXi Firewall on both ESXi Hosts.

# Run on Server & Client
esxcli network firewall set --enabled false

Now let’s start iPerf in Server mode.

# Start Server | Listening on 5201
/usr/lib/vmware/vsan/bin/iperf3.copy -s -B [IPERF-SERVER-IP]

Now go to the other ESXi Host and run the client.

# Start Client
/usr/lib/vmware/vsan/bin/iperf3 -t 10 -c [IPERF-SERVER-IP]

You should see a summary of the Interval, Data Transferred and Bandwidth of the sender and receiver.

My next post dive into VMware HCX performance testing from the command line.

Stay tuned…