Below is a link to a set of instructions on how to setup a “virtual tap” inside of the Observer analyzer (GigaStor Software Edition is Observer analyzer with a special license). Back in the day, systems were not really up to par with doing large amounts of packet level crunching with a VM environment. The original purpose of this document was to allow users to take all the N/S & E/W traffic in their ESX environment, bring it into the VM where Observer was running, and utilizing the Virtual Tap feature within Observer, send copies of all data out of the ESX server’s physical NIC to a hardware GigaStor for analysis. Since then servers have improved so the need to export the packets out of the VM are not absolutely necessary for most users. However, the principles are still the same. You can ignore any steps that talk about the virtual tap.
If you are installing the O/S from scratch, you will also want to use the vmxnet3 drivers for the NIC as they are better at receiving larger amounts of data than the standard drivers that are available at the time of a generic O/S installation.
Depending on the network cards installed in your ESX host, they may support virtIO drivers. If so, it is recommended to have these installed. These drivers make the performance for the NIC much better than just simply using the vmxnet3 drivers alone. This isn’t a one or the other. If possible you should use both. You will definitely need them if you are going to use a 10Gb NIC and receive any decent amount of data. Even at low speeds, you can see weird things happen, like packets out of order which were not sent out of order.
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