Categories: General ITGestalt ITVMware

Is Jumbo Frames Working?

I saw this little discussion on an internal mailing list a week or so ago and I've decided to post it too The SLOG – 1. So I don't forget it, 2. I'm sure many of you will at some point use Jumbo frames in the future on your vSphere environments.

Question: "Assuming that I enable jumbo frames, is there a way on in the VM to determine is jumbo frames are truly supported end-to-end?"

Answer:

In your VM, ping your destination with a large message and specify don’t fragment.

Linux VMs: ping –M do –s 8000 <ip address or destination>
Windows VMs: ping –f –l 8000 <ip address or destination>
ESX(i): vmkping –d –s 8000 <ip address or destination>

Simon Long

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View Comments

Jelle Kalf says:

September 15, 2010 at 8:47 am

Nice little 3 CLI lines to check if it works.

My expectations for the blog title were totally different to be honest. I thought you were doing a benchmark between jumbo frames and normal frames to show us whether or not there would be a performance increase for using jumbo frames.
- Simon Long says:
  
  September 15, 2010 at 9:34 am
  
  I guess it would have been called something like: "Jumbo Frames Performance" if I was going to show that sort of information.