Sluggish Network on Dell R610

[Bashed]

Got a new R610 and having strange network problems: slowness/latency.

I've installed the below for testing:
Centos 6.6
Centos 6.7

Also tested with: 2 different Cisco Switches and several ports (one 2950, one 3750)

Ran several tests with below command:

[root@localhost ~]# wget http://cachefly.cachefly.net/100mb.test
--2015-10-07 08:37:47-- http://cachefly.cachefly.net/100mb.test
Resolving cachefly.cachefly.net... 205.234.175.175
Connecting to cachefly.cachefly.net|205.234.175.175|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response.... 200 OK
Length: 104857600 (100M) [application/octet-stream]
Saving to: “100mb.test”
18% [=================================> ] 19,110,914 119K/s eta 1m 55s

I tried various Centos mirrors via wget, very slow.

I know it's not my network at the data center or switch saturation. I'm thinking it might be a driver issue, but I have a few other R610 boxes too. One had a similar issue, a BIOS/Firmware update apparently fixed that. Not in this case though.

Here's another thing:

I want to update the following:
BIOS
DRAC
NIC Drivers

Dell's site to me is very confusing. I found this Dell OS Driver Pack but cannot figure out how to install it. I booted into F10 (Lifecycle Controller) and platform update. I see only 3 options: ftp, networkshare, cd/dvd/usb.

I would appreciate help on this. Even drac keeps kicking me off console, timing out.

Current Versions:
BIOS: 6.4.0
Firmware: 1.70 (Build 21)
DRAC Enterprise 6

 

[whitey]

Well to start IMHO test on your LAN first and foremost via a tool such as iperf. I'd start there good sir between two machines you are certain have enterprise grade network/HW in.

 

[JeffroMart]

Also check speed and duplex on the switch and inside the OS, could not be auto negotiating correctly

 

[Bashed]

Also check speed and duplex on the switch and inside the OS, could not be auto negotiating correctly

It's already set on a Gige full

Gi1/0/22 connected 3 full 1000 10/100/1000BaseTX

 

[Terry Kennedy]

Got a new R610 and having strange network problems: slowness/latency.

I have some R710 systems (quad BCM5709) and never had any slowness issues with them (under FreeBSD). I eventually put Intel X540 10GbE cards in those systems, though.

What does iperf report? You can also run it against itself (using the loopback address) which will tell you what the maximum throughput of your TCP stack is (on the R710, it's around 35Gbit/sec without tuning on FreeBSD).

I want to update the following:
BIOS
DRAC
NIC Drivers
Dell's site to me is very confusing. I found this Dell OS Driver Pack but cannot figure out how to install it. I booted into F10 (Lifecycle Controller) and platform update. I see only 3 options: ftp, networkshare, cd/dvd/usb.

The easiest thing is to download the SUU DVD image (which is huge - 14.5GB this month - and needs to be de-bloated before buring it to media.

I boot the Dell CDU media and then select the firmware update option. It will ask for the SUU disc. If you are running a Dell-supported Linux distribution, you should be able to mount the SUU DVD and execute the suu shell script you find in the root of the SUU disc.