We're currently running two ESXi 5.1 hosts both of which use teamed 1 GB connections for the VM network. We have about 60 VMs across the two servers and every time the Vipre AV server pushes out updates to almost all VMs at once, the network connections (file, http, etc) slow down and sometimes drop off for seconds at a time altogether. So I thought the links were being saturated and tried to verify this in the Performance tab in vCenter. However, what I saw there perplexed me. I'm not even saturating half of my connection. The max is probably about 400 MBs. Now last week I noticed that one of the vmnics on one of the hosts was running in 100 MB mode. I assumed this was causing the issue. I simply unplugged the link plugged it back in and the vmnic connected back at 1 Gbps and has stayed there ever since. However, I'm still getting the slow VM performance during the definition updates.
This doesn't make sense to me. I would think I needed to tune the AV Update settings, but I'm not saturating my nics at all. What could be the issue?