A brief background, due to some kind of bug (detailed here) I now have my primary NIC for UnRAID set to a 10Gbe port (br0), and all my VMs mapped to a 1Gbe port (br1). This solves the problem in the link with network write speeds across the 10Gbe switch.

 

However - when I access my SMB shares from the VMs, I only get 1Gbe transfer speeds. Basically as if my VM is heading "out the door" onto the network then "back in" to UnRAID to access the data. Surely there's some way that the VM hypervisor can recognise that the shares are local and provide better speeds? The NIC in Windows shows 100Gbe as the connection speed. Any pointers?

 

Thanks

So, I put in a workaround. I set up a virtual network virbr1 with jumbo frames, and the Windows VMs access UnRAID via this network. I'm now getting 2GBps (yes GigaBytes) transfers.

 

I'll write up how to do this but in essence it's simply set up the virtual network, bind it to Samba, then access UnRAID shares via the IP address of the virtual network. Jumbo frames is important as it went from 300MB/s to 2GB/s with this setting, as well as using virtio not virtio-net. Also, I have the other network adapter bound for the rest of the network. For most people you could set the Virtual Network as a bridge, but my use case requires all the VMs to be accessible from the LAN as I'm using audio over IP.

Edited August 9, 20214 yr by DuckBrained

Interesting and thanks for sharing!

I tried to tackle that exact problem before but couldn't get anywhere. One of the reasons I decided to not use Unraid anymore and go baremetal instead with my Win10 to get the maximum speed to my spinning HDD.

@DuckBrained - I'm relatively new to Unraid but I've also been facing the same issue myself - I have a couple of m.2 drives in an array that I use for video editing over my network which access via 10GB network. On this I can comfortably saturate the network get 1GB/sec read/write. However when I access the shares through the VM I am constrained to 250MB/s reads. 

 

Could you possibly walk me through what you did to resolve this? Apologies - I'm relative new so I'm still finding my way around. 

11 hours ago, davidmul87 said:

Could you possibly walk me through what you did to resolve this? Apologies - I'm relative new so I'm still finding my way around. 

 

Sure, let me write it up and I'll post it here, might take me a day or two to complete as I'll need to retrace my steps. Also, can you confirm if you need to access any of your VMs directly from the EXTERNAL network. This is something I needed which gave me headaches (as I'm using audio over IP to specialist hardware) but if they just need to talk to each other, Unraid, and the internet, it's a lot simpler!

Edited August 18, 20214 yr by DuckBrained
More details needed

11 hours ago, davidmul87 said:

 

Could you possibly walk me through what you did to resolve this? Apologies - I'm relative new so I'm still finding my way around. 

 

One other thing, when you're on your VM settings page, under network do you have virbr0 available or just br0?