2

If you have two physical machines on a physical network, in order to share files, they have to traverse the network, and network equipment to get to each other. Even if you have two VMs on two separate ESXi's I would imagine they'd have to do this.

Now if you have two VMs on the same ESXi that access each others files, since they're both basically just software running on the same server, I would think there would be room here for a different algorithm underlying the abstraction in which they could access each others' files faster using what appears to the VMs themselves to be the same protocol of SMB.

Does VMWare do this? Because it appears to me that files are transferred faster between two VMs on the same ESXi than in the other two cases.

Community
  • 1
leeand00
  • 4,869
  • 15
  • 69
  • 110

1 Answers1

1

Network traffic between virtual machines on the same host and connected to the same virtual switch port group doesn't traverse the physical network, so yes it should be faster in that scenario.

joeqwerty
  • 109,901
  • 6
  • 81
  • 172
  • And it is actual network traffic? Just within the same machine? Or is it something else under-neath, that makes it accessed faster? – leeand00 Feb 24 '16 at 16:52
  • 1
    It is actual network traffic, confined to the vSwitch, which is a software construct, so no traffic has to exit the host onto the physical network and re-enter the host via the physical network. – joeqwerty Feb 24 '16 at 16:54
  • Okay, because it is awfully fast. Kind of makes you wonder if there's a way to avoid all that network traffic and just access the memory addresses on the other vm directly, but under cover of abstraction below the traffic level. Ah, I guess I'm being weird. Maybe you can do that in Docker or something (since those aren't actually VMs....naw that probably still wouldn't work...) – leeand00 Feb 24 '16 at 16:56