Modern physical NICs (pNIC) have several offloading capabilities. If you are running VMware NSX, which is using VXLAN, you could benefit from the VXLAN offloading feature. Using VXLAN offloading allows you to use TCP offloading mechanisms like TCP Segment Offload (TSO) and Checksum Segment Offload (CSO) because the pNIC is able to ‘look into’ encapsulated VXLAN packets. That results in lower CPU utilization and a possible performance gain. But how to determine what is actually supported by your pNIC and the used driver in ESXi?
It is recommended to follow these three steps to fully verify if the VXLAN offload feature you are looking for is supported and enabled.
Step 1: Check the support of the pNIC chipset
Step 2: Check the support of the driver module
Step 3: Check if the driver module needs configuration
The first step is to check the vendor information about the supported features on their pNIC product. Let’s take the combination of a 10GbE Broadcom QLogic 57810 NIC and the VXLAN offload feature as an example. Looking at the datasheet of the QLogic 57810 NIC, it clearly states that VXLAN offloading is supported.