ESXi Network Speed Test Step-By-Step
Want to find out how fast your ESXi network is ? or Do you experience slow while copying file from one esxi to another. Happy news is ESXi now have a built in tool to test the network speed.
I recently had an issue while copying file from one esxi to another and I wanted to find out the reason
I followed the exact step by step method below on my 2 ESXi 6.5 host
- Login to your first esxi hosts (and type following commands)
- change directory to cd /usr/lib/vmware/vsan/bin
- Make a copy of iperf3 using cp /usr/lib/vmware/vsan/bin/iperf3 /usr/lib/vmware/vsan/bin/iperf3.copy
- Note the IP of the interface you wanted to find the speed by using this command esxcli network ip interface ipv4 get
- Disable firewall using this command esxcli network firewall set –enabled false
- Prepare the command for the test. For iperf test you need 2 devices (first esxi host and second esxi host). Imagine the first esxi server I call as iperf server and the 2nd esxi host is iperf client . Find out the interface you wanted to know the bandwidth(speed). In this example I wanted to find the speed of vmk1 169.254.95.120 (check step #4). So the command will be iperf3.copy -s -B 169.254.95.120 This means I used first ESXi as the server (-s) and binded (-B) it to the interface on my host with IP 169.254.95.120. Once you run the command you will get this message “Server listening on 5201”
- Go to the 2nd ESXi host and do step 2,3 & 5
- Finally run this command iperf3.copy –c 169.254.95.120 –t 10 -i 5 -f g
- Above command will show you a result similar like below but you said iperf to start a client system ( -c) and connect to your iperf server (169.254.95.120). You also told iperf to ran a test for 10 seconds (-t 10) and show you the result in Gb( -f g) and report statistics every 5 seconds (-i 5). Once the test is completed, you can go back to your server (first esxi) and check the speed. Here on my server I got a speed of .07Gb which is really slow
Once you get the output you can quit iperf session using (control+D). Follow the same test once again but this time make esxi 2 as your iperf server and esxi 1 as your client. - Is your ESXi 1 and 2 have same speed?
