To take full advantage of the Intel® Converged Network Adapter's capabilities, enable Receive Side
Scaling (RSS) in the ESXi host to balance the CPU load across multiple cores. Refer to the VMware
performance paper VXLAN Performance Evaluation from VMware 5.1 for performance results
with Intel® Converged Network Adapter X520 with RSS enabled:
ESXi VSwitch | Firewall Performance Testing
Enable pnic RSS / mq:
in shell:
vmkload_mod -u ixgbe
vmkload_mod ixgbe RSS=”4,4,4,4,4,4″
in .vmx or advanced config:
ethernetX.pnicFeatures = “4”
allow multiple vnic thread for single vm:
ethernetX.ctxPerDev = “1”
sources:
http://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2015/04/network-improvements-vsphere-6-boost-performance-40g-nics.html