10G Ethernet: More Than a Big Pipe
by Johan De Gelas on November 24, 2010 2:34 PM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
- Networking
- 10G Ethernet
Native Bandwidth: Windows Server 2008
Our first test was done with Windows 2008 Server R2 Enterprise installed on both nodes. We used Ixia IxChariot 5.4 to test throughtput. Two subtests were performed; one with standard Ethernet frame length (1.5KB) and one with 9KB jumbo frames. All tests were done with four threads. One of the most interesting enhancements in Windows Server 2008 is Receive-Side Scaling (RSS), a feature that spreads the receive processing out over several CPU cores. RSS was enabled in the driver properties.
All three NICs perform worse with jumbo frames than without. Jumbo frames lowers the CPU load for every NIC from 13-14% to 10%. Still only 5-5.6 Gbit/s is pretty disappointing. The Solarflare and Neterion NIC are clearly made for virtualized environments. CPU load was around 14% for the Neterion and Intel NICs when we tested with standard Ethernet frames, while Solarflare’s NIC needed 10%. When we enabled Jumbo frames, all NICs needed about 10% of the available CPU power (the Xeon E5504 at 2GHz).
The latency of the Solarflare NIC is higher than the other chips. Since Solarflare has put a lot of effort into an optimized opensource network stack for Linux called “OpenOnload”, we assume that the low latency that Solarflare claims are for Linux NIC latency. That makes sense as Linux is dominant in the HPC cluster world. In HPC clusters, latency matters more than bandwidth.
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fr500 - Wednesday, November 24, 2010 - link
I guess there is LACP or PAGP and some propietary solution.A quick google told me it's called cross-module trunking.
mlambert - Wednesday, November 24, 2010 - link
FCoE, iSCSI (*not that you would, but you could), FC, and IP all across the same link. Cisco offers VCP LACP with CNA as well. 2 links per server, 2 links per storage controller, thats not many cables.mlambert - Wednesday, November 24, 2010 - link
I meant VPC and Cisco is the only one that offers it today. I'm sure Brocade will in the near future.Zok - Friday, November 26, 2010 - link
Brocade's been doing this for a while with the Brocade 8000 (similar to the Nexus 5000), but their new new VDX series takes it a step further for FCoE.Havor - Wednesday, November 24, 2010 - link
Do these network adapters are real nice for servers, don't need a manged NIC, i just really want affordable 10Gbit over UTP ore STP.Even if its only 30~40M / 100ft because just like whit 100Mbit network in the old days my HDs are more then a little out preforming my network.
Wondering when 10Gbit will become common on mobos.
Krobar - Thursday, November 25, 2010 - link
Hi Johan,Wanted to say nice article first of all, you pretty much make the IT/Pro section what it is.
In the descriptions of the cards and conclusion you didnt mention Solarflares "Legacy" Xen netfront support. This only works for paravirt Linux VMs and requires a couple of extra options at kernal compile time but it run like a train and requires no special hardware support from the motherboard at all. None of the other brands support this.
marraco - Thursday, November 25, 2010 - link
I once made a resume of total cost of the network on the building where I work.Total cost of network cables was far larger than the cost of the equipment (at least with my country prices). Also, solving any cable related problem was a complete hell. The cables were hundreds, all entangled over the false roof.
I would happily replace all that for 2 of tree cables with cheap switches at the end. Selling the cables would pay for new equipment and even give a profit.
Each computer has his own cable to the central switch. A crazy design.
mino - Thursday, November 25, 2010 - link
IF you go 10G for cable consolidation, you better forget about cheap switches.The real saving are in the manpower, not the cables themselves.
myxiplx - Thursday, November 25, 2010 - link
If you're using a Supermicro Twin2, why don't you use the option for the on board Mellanox ConnectX-2? Supermicro have informed me that with a firmware update these will act as 10G Ethernet cards, and Mellanox's 10G Ethernet range has full support for SR-IOV:Main product page:
http://www.mellanox.com/content/pages.php?pg=produ...
Native support in XenServer 5:
http://www.mellanox.com/content/pages.php?pg=produ...
AeroWB - Thursday, November 25, 2010 - link
Nice Article,It is great to see more test around virtual environments. What surprises me a little bit is that at the start of the article you say that ESXi and Hyper-V do not support SR-IOV yet. So I was kind of expecting a test with Citrix Xenserver to show the advantages of that. Unfortunately it's not there. I hope you can do that in the near future.
I work with both Vmware ESX and Citrix XenServer we have a live setup of both. We started with ESX and later added a XenServer system, but as XenServer is getting more mature and gets more and more features we probably replace the ESX setup with XenServer (as it is much much cheaper) when maintenance runs out in about one year so I'm really interested in tests on that platform.