Various Network Adapter Types of VMware Interface

The VMware virtual network adapter types available to a FreeSBC or ProSBC guest, and which to choose for management versus VoIP interfaces.

Types of network interfaces for FreeSBC

FreeSBC uses network interface types below,

• Intel E1000 emulated NIC card

• VMXNET3 para-virtualized driver

• PCI Passthrough

• SR-IOV

The VMware adapter types setting can be set from below,

Vmware adapter types setting

And then see TSBC-SW:WebPortal:Initial Configuration

E1000

E1000 makes the VM to think it is really accessing a physical NIC adapter. It is simulated (i.e. slowest of all interface types) but is universally supported.

VMXNET3

VMXNET3 is a driver where the VM knows it runs in a virtual environment. It is faster than emulated NIC but requires the VM to have open-vm-tools.rpm installed.

PCI Passthrough

PCI Passthrough allows a VM to access directly (using PCI bus) one physical NIC from the host.

• Very fast access

• Rx hardware buffers dedicated to one VM

• Dedicates the NIC to only a single VM

• VM cannot be migrated to another host live because of changing PCI ID of the NIC card

• DPDK needs to support the physical NIC adapter

• Host bios needs to have been enabled to support DMA remapping (IOMMU or Intel VT-d)

Network PCI device can be added to VM from below,

Adding PCI device to VM

And then see TSBC-SW:Cloud:VMware Adding Passthrough Interfaces A

SR-IOV

SR-IOV allows multiple VM to access directly to one portion of a physical NIC from from host.

• Very fast access

• Rx hardware buffers dedicated to one VM

• Can share a single NIC card with multiple VMs

• VM cannot be migrated to another host live because of changing PCI ID of the NIC card

• DPDK needs to support the physical NIC adapter

• Vmware host needs to have the license to allow SR-IOV

• Host bios needs to have been enabled to support DMA remapping (IOMMU or Intel VT-d)

• Physical NIC adapter needs to be SR-IOV capable

SR-IOV can be configured from below,

Configure SR IOV in VM

Latest performance metrics on Vmware 6.5

Network interface types	Nb max sessions (*)
E1000	5,000
VMXNET3	8,000
PCI Passthrough	36,000
SR-IOV	(no license available) Probably close to PCI passthrough

• • Tested on a Dell R610, 3.07Ghz with 6 vCPU