TCP Segmentation Offload (TSO) is the equivalent to TCP/IP Offload Engine (TOE) but more modeled to virtual environments, where TOE is the actual NIC vendor hardware enhancement. It is also known as Large Segment Offload (LSO). But what does it do?
When a ESXi host or a VM needs to transmit a large data packet to the network, the packet must be broken down to smaller segments that can pass all the physical switches and possible routers in the network along the way to the packet’s destination. TSO allows a TCP/IP stack to emit larger frames, even up to 64 KB, when the Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU) of the interface is configured for smaller frames. The NIC then divides the large frame into MTU-sized frames and prepends an adjusted copy of the initial TCP/IP headers. This process is referred to as segmentation.
When the NIC supports TSO, it will handle the segmentation instead of the host OS itself. The advantage being that the CPU can present up to 64 KB of data to the NIC in a single transmit-request, resulting in less cycles being burned to segment the network packet using the host CPU. To fully benefit from the performance enhancement, you must enable TSO along the complete data path on an ESXi host. If TSO is supported on the NIC it is enabled by default.
The same goes for TSO in the VMkernel layer and for the VMXNET3 VM adapter but not per se for the TSO configuration within the guest OS. To verify that your pNIC supports TSO and if it is enabled on your ESXi host, use the following command: esxcli network nic tso get. The output will look similar the following screenshot, where TSO is enabled for all available pNICs or vmnics.
