I saw this little discussion on an internal mailing list a week or so ago and I’ve decided to post it too The SLOG — 1. So I don’t forget it, 2. I’m sure many of you will at some point use Jumbo frames in the future on your vSphere environments.

Question: “Assuming that I enable jumbo frames, is there a way on in the VM to determine is jumbo frames are truly supported end-to-end?”

Answer:

In your VM, ping your destination with a large message and specify don’t fragment.

• Linux VMs:         ping —M do —s 8000  <ip address or destination>
• Windows VMs:  ping —f —l 8000  <ip address or destination>
• ESX(i):                vmkping —d —s 8000  <ip address or destination>