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+--- Thread: VMWare Client slow http download (/showthread.php?tid=7038)
VMWare Client slow http download - sdlewis - 2013-09-09 12:57
Hi
Hope fully someone can help. We currently have issues downloading winpe.wim from our RIS server the VMWare client uses the vmxnet3 network adapter. The client boots into iPXE but the download of winpe.wim takes about 1.5 minutes to download the 170mb file.
I have completed a wireshark trace which shows a large number of duplicate ACKs, retransmissions and TCP Out-of-order messages, which i am sure that this is causing the slowness on the download. I was wondering if anyone else had seen this issue.
We are running the latest version of iPxe downloaded from github (although on bootup on the client it lists the version as 1.0.0+.
I would upload the capture but unfortuantely our firewall blocks attachments.
Thanks
Simon
RE: VMWare Client slow http download - robinsmidsrod - 2013-09-11 17:04
If your iPXE client shows the version number 1.0.0+ you're not using the latest version. The current version has a parentheses with the abbreviated git commit id behind the version number. Make sure you build from the master branch. Also, the main repo is on git.ipxe.org, not github (although the github repo is a mirror that is supposed to update regularly). If you have the latest version, you should also be able to see the version by typing show version.
There was some TCP improvements a while back (some time in 2013). My guess is that you're using a version that is older than this.
RE: VMWare Client slow http download - sdlewis - 2013-09-11 18:05
Hi Robin
Appreciate the reply. Would you know the link to the latest version? I looked on github and took what I thought was the latest version and from the list at http://git.ipxe.org/ipxe.git the ones at the top listed with a green label master was the one I thought was the latest, or am I horribly wrong?
Thanks
Simon
RE: VMWare Client slow http download - sdlewis - 2013-09-12 16:41
Hi Robin
This is the link I have downloaded https://git.ipxe.org/ipxe.git/snapshot/8dd180f165eb8cd0a8475c0fd19bd6dbf17f95d8.zip which is ipxe-8dd180f. But when I make it, show version still shows 1.0.0+, I'm not a Linux person by trade but i'm sure i'm not doing anything incorrectly. Really like to get this issue sorted as the bank want to use only ipxe going forward.
Thanks
Simon
RE: VMWare Client slow http download - robinsmidsrod - 2013-09-15 12:38
The way to build the latest version is to follow the instructions at http://ipxe.org/download and copy src/bin/ipxe.pxe to your TFTP directory after the make command has completed. If you need some more assistance on using Git, I know http://help.github.com/ is decent, and also several of the resources on the main git website are good. The stable branch of ipxe is the "master" branch of the repo you pointed at above. 8dd1 is currently the tip of that branch and the latest stable version. The version number hasn't been modified since the fork 2+ years ago, but the newer versions have the commit id appended to it. That should help you out more.
RE: VMWare Client slow http download - SoulA - 2014-12-10 18:02
Sorry to drudge up an old thread but I am also having a similar issue and rather than creating a new post this seemed more appropriate.
Using the latest from git (5cbdc4177) and am getting, alteast what I think, are slow download speeds on vmxnet3 using ipxe. I'm fairly new to ipxe so I'm not sure what slow/fast are in the ipxe world but downloading a ~220MB file is taking ~1 minute.
I did see that ipxe has a vmxnet3 driver and you can build a rom specifically for vmxnet3 on this page:
http://ipxe.org/howto/vmware
I am not doing this however and am just chain booting to ipxe.pxe/undionly.kpxe. Does this method not load that vmxnet3 driver properly? Is there something else I might need to do to get things to go faster? Is this as fast as things go?