I’ve just finished building this ESX4i server with a few VMs in it and as I plug it into the serve space and into the network switch, I notice that the vSphere console is laggy, to the point of being really annoying.
I ping the server from a workstation, a few packets get lost in transit. I grew the ping packets to 60 kilobytes, and sure enough, about 10% packet loss. I tried pinging the hypervisor management interface, still from my workstation, and I get a slightly lower, but still significant amount of packet loss.
After checking all my cables and trying another network switch, I finally saw that the switch was not illuminating the “Full duplex” light, indicating it was, instead, half-duplex.
Going back into vSphere client, clicking my host in the left menu, then going in the configuration tab, then Networking, then Properties. Second tab “Network Adapters”, then Edit. In there, the Status of my physical NIC was set at 100 mbit Full Duplex (so it should have worked.) I changed it to Auto Negociate and now everything works perfectly. 1800 ping packets transmitted, 0 loss.
Tags: esx, esx4i, network, networking, packet loss, server, virtualization, vmware