Dell Emulex Family of Adapters - Manual (Page 1003)

Emulex Drivers Version 10.2 for VMware ESXi User Manual P010087-01A Rev. A
2. Installation
Installing the NIC Driver
1003
Using NParEP
Notes:

NParEP is available only on OCe14000-series adapters.

SR-IOV must be enabled on the system BIOS when NParEP is used. See the
documentation that accompanied your Dell server for more information.

NParEP support is available only on Dell 13G or newer systems.
NParEP can be configured on the OCe14000 family of adapters by using the adapter
BIOS utility or the OneCommand Manager for VMware vCenter application.

To configure NParEP using the adapter BIOS utility, see the Boot for NIC, iSCSI,
FCoE, and RoCE Protocols User Manual.

To configure NParEP using the OneCommand Manager for VMware vCenter
application, see the OneCommand Manager for VMware vCenter User Manual.
Configuring Network Heap Size in ESXi Server 5.0 and 5.1
The amount of memory allocated by default for a network heap depends on the
amount of memory configured in the system. The ESXi Server network stack allocates a
minimum of 64 MB to the network heap to handle network data. Additional memory is
allocated to the network heap if the system is configured with more memory. If the
network load requires more than 64 MB of memory, the NIC driver cannot allocate it.
When this happens, the driver logs messages in the file /proc/vmware/log indicating
that the alloc_skb() call failed. This impacts network performance considerably.
To read the current size of the network heap, run the following command:
# esxcfg-advcfg -j netPktHeapMaxSize
netPktHeapMaxSize = 0
#
If the default value of 64 MB is in effect, this command shows the PktHeapMaxSize as
0. If any other value is in effect, the command returns that value.
You can allocate more memory for the network heap using the esxcfg-advcfg
command. For example, to set the heap size to 128 MB, run the following commands:
# esxcfg-advcfg -k 128 netPktHeapMaxSize
# esxcfg-advcfg -j netPktHeapMaxSize
netPktHeapMaxSize = 128
#
The new value takes effect after a reboot.
Obtaining Information on the Installed NIC Driver
To get information on the installed NIC driver on ESXi 5.0 and 5.1 systems, enter
esxcli software vib list | grep be2net
This is a sample output: