FreeNAS 8.2 RC1 - Network Performance within VMware Workstation

[dweimer]

I am trying to test out the new Plugins architecture in FreeNAS 8.2, so I built a VMware workstation 6.5 virtual machine and installed FreeNAS 8.2 RC1 form ISO. So far so good, can access the GUI and everything looks fine. But when starting the Plugins Jail PBI upload, its taking forever, So I created a SMB share and started copying the file up to narrow down the problem. Its running at 23.1KB/second transfer rate, so now I know its slow, but can't figure out why. Next step I ran a dd if=/dev/random of=/mnt/RAIDZ/TEST/test.out bs=1024 count=100000, results were, that it created a 98MB file in just under 3 seconds. Not lightening fast, but good enough for testing a VM of a NAS appliance for functionality. So its not storage back end related, which leaves networking.
I have other test VMs running FreeBSD 8 and 9 which I regularly test applications on and haven't seen any network performance issues this bad on them. Has anyone else ran into this issue, and have any idea what to look at for tuning to speed this up? My main goal of this system is to test installing bacula-fd within the Plugins jail. I don't need great performance, but I would like to be able to backup a few hundred MB in a reasonable amount of time as a valid test before trying to deploy 8.2 when its final on my production system which I hacked to install bacula-fd from packages.

 

[dweimer]

<solved, well not really, just not FreeNAS 8.2 RC1's fault> After finally getting the jail uploaded, I discovered the problem only occurs when the connection is initiated from outside the box. For example when copying a file from my PC to the Virtual Machine using the test share and SMB, or when trying to download a file I have uploaded. However if I ssh into the machine and do an SFTP, FTP, or even csup to download the ports tree onto the jail, everything ran great. Test backup through bacula, grabbed 98MB that I had on the test share in seconds. Bacula client on the jail pushes data to the Bacula storage daemon, so again this connection is initiated by the Virtual Machine.
Then I got to thinking Hey I haven't tested this from another machine besides my local PC. It appears this problem is related entirely to the version of VMware (stuck on 6.5, can't get boss to approve for the upgrade) I am running and the PC (Windows 7). As I can copy and move files from another machine to this virtual machine running on my PC with great performance. As in 10M file in a blink of an eye either way. But when accessed via the local PC it just dogs, so apparently the bridging between the VM and the PCs adapter is causing problems with the PC talking to the VMware virtual machine, and not related to the FreeNAS install at all.