As you can imagine I was quite interested in seeing what the new Dynamic load balancing mode in NIC teaming can do for us. Especially in a switch independent configuration as until now there was no possibility to leverage the complete bandwidth provided by the NIC team when migrating between only 2 nodes.

So we set up  a NIC team in switch independent mode with Dynamic load balancing. Here’s a screenshot of the NIC team setup. LM is the NIC team I’m using for some live migration testing.

For these tests we used TCP/IP to do the live migrations. I’ll be sharing the compression & Multichannel performance option results in a later blog and do some comparisons. But for now I can inform you that with Dynamic load balancing we can now also use all member of a NIC team for live migration even in switch independent mode. I’m a fan of switch independent mode. Now possibly even more. Speeds for live migrating 6 VMs simultaneously with 9GB of memory were 28-30 seconds.

The CPU load not very low but RSS does it’s job to spread it out.

Now the beauty of al this is that this had no negative impact due to out of order packets. For one a single live migration sticks to a single team member. Here’s a screenshot of a single VM live migrated over a NIC Team with Dynamic load balancing.

As you can see there will not be out of order packets in this case.

Secondly the Dynamic load balancing mode is based on the “flowlets”. This means that the impact due to out or order /reordering of TCP/IP packets is minimal.

I also refer you to the following article Dynamic Load Balancing Without Packet Reordering.The conclusion is quite interesting:

We have introduced the concept of flowlet-switching and developed an algorithm which utilizes flowlets in traffic splitting. Our work reveals several interesting conclusions. First,highly accurate traffic splitting can be implemented with little to no impact on TCP packet reordering and with negligible state overhead. Next, flowlets can be used to make load balancing more responsive, and thus help enable a new generation of real-time adaptive traffic engineering. Finally, the existence and usefulness of flowlets show that TCP burstiness is not necessarily a bad thing, and can in fact be used advantageously.

And now as a show closer let’s do live migrations between both hosts in both directions.

Speed people, in live migration is a thing of beauty. Microsoft is really providing us with lots of options. This is good. We can use what’s available, where available, when available and make sure we get the best possible solution and performance whatever the environment and budget.