MikroTik

Xeon e5506
32gb ram
chelsio t520 sfp+ NIC

700mbps NAT + Fast-Track

4 cores assigned to virtual machine

60% CPU usage on ROuterOS confirmed on Proxmox GUI
profile shows networking and ethernet cpu usage


Is this normal??

any advice to improve performance??

Hard to say is it normal. There are lot of factors, like host NIC drivers, cpu version and etc...
Performance tweaks are here.
General recommendations:

• try use 'PCI passthrough' for NIC (ROs probably will not detect NIC's due to missing drivers)

• use 'host' CPU instead of kvm64

• disable PVE 'firewall' for virtual network devices

• use Virtio devices (disk and network) to have full integration with PVE

• use 'write back' for disk

• use one socket for CHR VM

• play with CPU flags, try remove 'hpet' from CHR VM (via CPU args)

• disable 'tablet for pointer'

• separate networks for admin purposes and for main traffic

Enable multi queue on the virtual nic also check the MTU
I am running 4 cores multi queue 4 and MTU 9000 and now the performance is much better. The MTU 9000 because that is what we are running on the switches

Here is a performance comparison I did between ESXi, ProxMox and HyperV

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcgdGA1W_0o

Here is a performance comparison I did between ESXi, ProxMox and HyperV

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcgdGA1W_0o

thx for your answer

i have seen it, and was very helpfull than you four your presentation, we tried vmware esxi and got better results than proxmox, for now we keep on esxi, still not tried hyper-v

we get better performance with core i5 8400 than Xeon e5506, whit proxmox and esxi

but

proxmox had not stable performance with around 1gbps of customer traffic (internet traffic 1500 customers) esxi stable performance tried up to 1500mbps of traffic and rising

i think proxmox requires some special tuning that we do not know, or maybe the NIC drivers have some problem, esxi required manual NIC driver install but ater that works nicely without any special tuning