When there is a physical or a virtual switch that is not configured to use the same size of MTU frames as your network interfaces that you configured during the deployment of your vSphere Bitfusion servers, your network packets can be fragmented, which results in poor network performance.

If during the deployment of vSphere Bitfusion you did not configure your network interfaces to use a specific MTU frame size, you can verify that the network connection between your vSphere Bitfusion servers and clients is working correctly. Most network interfaces have a default MTU size of 1500 frames, while the recommended MTU size for the management network (Network 1) is 1500 frames and for the data networks (Network 2, 3, 4) - 9000 frames.

Procedure

  1. Open a terminal application and run the ssh customer@ip_address command, where ip_address is the IP address of your vSphere Bitfusion server.
    You can obtain the vSphere Bitfusion server IP address from the vSphere Bitfusion Plug-in.
  2. Enter the customer password that you specified during the deployment of the vSphere Bitfusion server.
  3. To view the MTU frame size that is configured for each network interface, run the ip addr | grep net | grep mtu command. 
    support@bf-server-1 [ ~ ]$ ip addr | grep net | grep mtu
2: net2: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 9000 qdisc mq state UP group default qlen 1000
3: net1: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc mq state UP group default qlen 1000

    For example, the net1 network interface has an MTU size of 1500 frames and net2 has an MTU size of 9000 frames.

What to do next

Additionally, you can view the MTU size of the network packets that are transfered between a network interface of a vSphere Bitfusion server and a client. You can verify that the MTU size is correct by running the max-mtu.sh client_IP command on each vSphere Bitfusion client that your server is connected to, where client_IP is the IP adress of the vSphere Bitfusion client.

The max-mtu.sh script displays the MTU size value that you configured for the network interface. If the script displays an unexpected value, you can troubleshoot the issue by verifing that the MTU size is configured correctly in the properties of your vSphere Standard Switch or vSphere Distributed Switch.