I am having difficulty analyzing the various data I receive at the host level, versus within the vSphere client. I need this to determine if a change I made to a VM is fixing a specific problem, as well as to find out if there are other issues with the networking.
The VM in question is on an ESXi 5.1 host, and it is a Windows server 2008 R2.
What I did was upgrade the VM hardware from version 7 to version 9, deleted the E1000 NIC and installed the VMXNET3 NIC. This was done because there was a number of receive packets dropped for this VM, and we had been having issues with the DB that runs on it.
After I made the above changes, this VM is showing a rather large number of receive packets dropped while monitoring via the vSphere client in real-time. Compared to packets received, it would appear that there is a 43% loss (average packets received summation = 763, average receive packets dropped summation = 565).
However, when I monitor the host this VM is on with esxtop, and viewing the network statistics after a 10 minute run, all values for %DRPRX = 0.00.
I am trying to evaluate the fix I made to this VM, because prior to that fix, I was seeing an average %DRPRX of about 2.65% as well as the dropped packets in the client.
Can someone explain to me why esxtop would show 0.00% receive packets dropped, while at the same time the performance charts in the vSphere client show what I believe to be about 43% loss?
Lastly, within the VMXNET3 device on the VM, the values for Rx Ring #1 Size, and Rx Ring #2 Size are blank. Should I be stting this to the default of 1024?
Any help would be appreciated. Thanks,
Ken