I am curious if a TOE type adapted would severely benefit VMWare host servers.
In doing some research, the manufacturer that claims the best benefit of their "TOE" adapters is Alacritech.
At approx $950 per single port adapter, they certainly seem proud.
Alacritech tells me that their TNIC (TOE) adapter benefits not only iSCSI initiators, but also file server performance.
I have noticed that even on non virtualized standalone Windows 2003 servers on HP Proliant DL380G4's, that with Teaming the embedded Broadcom Gigabit NIC's and Smartarray 6i Caching Battery Backed up Ultra320 Array controllers, 15K RPM drives, defragged drives, and all other performance enchancing tweaks and components I can think of, I can never really get more than 30-40% utilization on the Gigabit card between any two comparably equipped servers..
I would think that making one of these servers a VMWare server host would introduce a new bottleneck at the NIC and perhaps the Alacritech engineer's claims would be true that a TOE type gigabit adapter would help VMWare guests on a Windows 2003 server utililize more bandwidth on the gigabit network.
HP and Dell both seem to have "TOE" type gigabit adapters.. Alacritech's comment was that HP's had Broadcom NetXtreme II components and code that HP licensed from Alacritech for the TOE engine..
He further commented that HP branded TOE adapters are not near as fast as the Alacritech TNIC.
Since HP's is about $400 and the Alacritech is about $950.. I begin to wonder if this is true.
Still, if anyone out there has tried hosts with and without TOE adapters in them, I would like to hear what it was like for you.
TIA