VirtualBox - Windows 7 x64 Host - Slow Networking

[ThermoX]

Hello everyone,

This has been driving me insane and I just can't find the answer anywhere.

Here's my current setup:

Computer runs Intel Core i7 5960x (8 Cores), 32 GB of Ram and the main board is an ASRock X99m Killer. All the BIOS settings for Virtualization have been set.

- Host OS Windows 7 x64 Professional

- VirtualBox 4.3.26 r98988 with the corresponding VBoxGuestAdditions on the guest machines

- Clients OSes - Multiple Windows 7 x64 Professional (issue shows up as soon as I have more than 1 VM, actually)

- Each VM System's settings has the "Enable I/O APIC", "Enable PAE/NX", "Enable VT-x/AMD-V" and "Enable Nested Paging" settings Set.

- All VM Network settings are configured with "Bridged Adapter" and each VM uses a dedicated NIC card.

- On each of the dedicated VM NIC card, on the host machine, I've unchecked ALL Network options EXCEPT the "Virtual Bridged Networking Driver".

- On the NIC card dedicated to the Host, I've unchecked the "VirtualBox Bridged Networking Driver".

Now.... The problems...

When I launch my first Windows VM, the Network performance on that VM is fine. I can download large files steadily. However, as soon as I open up a second VM, Network performance becomes extremely erratic on BOTH VM's and my downloads often fail. Note that on the Host machine, downloads don't seem to be significantly affected by the number of running VM.

I thought buying dedicated NIC's would solve my problem... but it hasn't... and I'm $200+ poorer...

Any help with be greatly appreciated.

Regards.

[Perryg]

Have you tried the paravirtual network adapter for the guests. You will need to run down the Windows drivers for it but I find it works a lot better.

[ThermoX]

Hi,

Well... the whole "paravirtual" approach is pretty confusing to me. The VirtualBox documentation I found on it was quite minimal. In fact, this is the documentation I found:

(ok, as a new member, I can't post a link... but it's about "www_virtualbox_org/manual/ch06_html")

As you can see... there really isn't much to work with there. From that link, I Googled "virtio-net", which led me to Virtio KVM. Now, I wasn't familiar with KVM (I'm more of a Windows guy)... so I thought KVM was just some open-source project name for those drivers. I followed the links on the KVM page, which led me to a Redhat website where I could download an ISO with the binaries for Windows. Once I had that, I was stalled. That's when I Googled up KVM and found that it was just another Linux-specific solution. So all that messing around led me nowhere and that's how I, wrongfully (according to your comment now), concluded that this was just some Linux specific thing.

But if you have more info on this, I'd LOVE to give it a try!

Thanks in advance...

[Perryg]

No it is not a Linux only solution that's why they say Windows drivers. You do go to KVM for the drivers and it may send you to a different locations now. I have not had to download an update so I can't tell you about that, but you mount the ISO in the guest and install the drivers there. VirtualBox itself has the host side code built in for the VirtIO adapter so you don't worry about that, just select it in the settings.


Note: we used to be able to get them from Oracle but now they have it where you must have a support contract to get them.

[ThermoX]

Well, I guess I understood I could install those drivers from within the Client Windows... But I'm not seeing the VirtIO option on the Host Windows. That's when I concluded that the option was probably only available on a Linux VirtualBox. What am I missing?? I would think that the option would be under the "Network" settings...

Maybe I'll kick myself if/when I see it...

[Perryg]

With the guest shut down go into the guest network setting in the VirtualBox Main manager. See screen shot below.

W7-VirtIO.png (58 KiB) Viewed 3622 times

[Perryg]

Oh they hide these options in Advanced so don't beat yourself up too much.

[ThermoX]

THERE IT IS!!!

I was looking under the "Attached to" and "Name" fields... didn't even think about looking under the "Adapter Type".... so yeah.... I'll be kicking myself for a while as this should have been pretty obvious, if I had thought about it a little more...

Thanks for you help!

[ThermoX]

Hopefully, that'll fix my problem... I'll let you know, in case you care to find out.

[Perryg]

Sure I'm interested. While I can't promise it will fix your issue, it has a good chance to at least help and maybe fix the issue. I know there is a huge difference in network speed and the reason I go to all the trouble of installing it.

[ThermoX]

I thought it'd be a slam dunk at this point... but getting Code 10 and having to Google THAT up now...

This is when computers become frustrating...

[ThermoX]

Alright... I've got some updates... nothing to make me look any better...

The Code 10 was due to version 96 of the drivers. The main web page I found where the "latest drivers" were supposed to be, was actually pointing to an old version which had a bug resulting on that Code 10. Someone mentioned the bug here:

forums_virtualbox_org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=65592 (again, due to me being new, I'm not posting the actual link)

So once I finally got my hands on version 100, released on the 01/22/2015 as mentioned in the link above, the Code 10 went away (after reboot of the guest machine).

However... I still had the same problem...

That's when it (finally) dawned on me that it HAD to be because I had the same MAC address on both cards, as defined on the Host. Never really paid too much attention to that setting, not fully knowing the consequences of keeping the same number (I had other reasons to keep the same number, on Windows installation... let's leave it at that...). Once I changed the numbers to be different on both cards... voilà. Network speed was nice and steady on both machines... even with the built-in Intel adapters.

Anyway... Learned the hard way... but I've leaned something.

Thanks again for you time Perryg!

[ThermoX]

The other interesting thing to note, which might just an impression, is that I felt that 1 VM was always working a little better than the other one, once both were up and running. That one machine had a "lower" IP address than the other... so that one machine ended with .11 while as the other one ended with .12. Wondering if the router was "hitting" the .11 before, with a conflicting configuration. I don't know enough about how the MAC is used to know for sure. But I thought I'd mention it.