Category Archives: Microsoft

Live Migration over NIC Team in Switch Independent Mode With Dynamic Load Balancing & Compression in Windows Server 2012 R2

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In a previous blog post Live Migration over NIC Team in Switch Independent Mode With Dynamic Load Balancing & TCP/IP in Windows Server 2012 R2 we looked at what 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. I that blog we used TCP/IP. Now we’ll configure Compression and see what that does for us.

So we set up a NIC team in switch independent mode with Dynamic load balancing, it’s identical as that one used for the tests with TCP/IP.

Compression basically slashes the live migration times in half at a cost. CPU cycles.And again with Dynamic load balancing we can now also use all member of a NIC team for live migration even in switch independent mode. The speeds for live migrating 6 VMs  with 9GB of memory simultaneously were 12-14 seconds.

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Take a look at the screen shot above. You see 6 VMs coming in to the host where these counters are collected and after that you see them being live migrated away from the host. As we have plenty of idle cycles I this test lab they get used, both when being the target and the source of the VMs being live migrated. You can also see that a lot less bandwidth is needed to achieve a faster live migration experience (compared to TCP/IP).

By the looks of it the extra bandwidth will help out when we have less CPU and vice versa. This is both the case for a single NIC or teamed NICs. Do note that you cannot combine compression with Multichannel. That means that the only scenario allowing for multiple NICs to be used with compression is NIC teaming. When you have a bunch  of free 1Gbps NICs in surplus this might get things moving for you!

Interesting stuff. I’m really looking forward to the moment we can run production loads on these configurations …

Live Migration over NIC Team in Switch Independent Mode With Dynamic Load Balancing & TCP/IP in Windows Server 2012 R2

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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.image

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.image

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

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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.image

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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.image

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.

Learn & Evaluate Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview

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If you are anything like a lot of people I know and myself you will be very eager to start testing the new features & capabilities of Windows Server 2012 R2 that is now available for testing purposes in preview. Now Microsoft has launched their IT Pro Summer Grand Prix campaign that might get you something extra next to the knowledge you will gain.

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If you are going to do this why not surf to http://www.microsoft.com/nl-be/technet/summer-grandprix/#track1 and dive into Track 1 of the IT Pro Summer Grand Prix to download the public preview of Windows Server 2012 R2. image

When you do so, feel free to leave you contact information and be eligible to win a rather exclusive Windows Server headset.

Stay tuned because the next track will be all about System Center (June 15th) that holds even bigger benefits for being an early evaluator of the R2 wave.

Happy testing, learning and playing! One thing I found is that Windows 2012 R2 installations are that fast it feels like driving a race car Smile

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DELL PowerEdge VRTX Has Potential Beyond ROBO As a Scale Out File Server Building Block

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The PowerEdge VRTX

I went to have a chat with Dell at TechEd 2013 Europe in Madrid. The VRTX was launched during DELL Enterprise Forum early June 2013 this concept packs a punch and I encourage you to go look at the VRTX (pronounced as “Vertex”) in more detail here. It’s a very quite setup which can be hooked up to standard power. Pretty energy efficient when you consider the power of the VRTX. And the entire setup surely packs a lot of punch at an attractive price point.

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It can serve perfectly for Remote Office / Branch Office (ROBO) deployments but has many more use cases as it’s very versatile. In my humble opinion DELL’s latest form factor could be used for some very nice scale out scenarios. It’s near perfect for a Windows Server 2012 Scale Out File Server (SOFS) building block. While smaller ones can be build using 1Gbps the future just needs 10Gbps networking.

10Gbps, RDMA (iWarp, RoCE)

That’s the first thing I missed and the first thing I was told that would arrive very soon. So I’m  very happy with that. With sufficient 10Gbps ports to servers and  iWarp or RoCE RDMA capable NICs (there’s cheap enough compared to ordinary 10Gbps cards not to have to leave that capability out) we have all we need to function as powerful building block for the Scale Out File Server model with Windows Server 2012 (R2) where the CSV network becomes the storage network leveraging redirected IO. For this concept look at this picture from a presentation a year ago. SMB 3.0 Multichannel and RDMA make this possible.

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While then I drew the SOFS building blocks out of R720 7 & MD1200  hardware, the VRTX could fit in there perfectly!

Storage Options

Today DELL uses their implementation of Clustered PCI Raid for shared storage which is supported since Windows Server 2012. This is great. For the moment it’s a non redundant setup but a redundant one is in the works I’m told. Nice, but think positive, redirected IO  (block level) over SMB 3.0 would save our storage IO even today. It would be a very wise and great addition to the capabilities of this building block to add the option & support for Storage Spaces. This would make the Scale Out File Server concept shine with the VRTX.

Why? Well I would give us following benefits in the storage layer and the VHDX format in Hyper-V can take benefits :

  • Deduplication
  • Thin Provisioning
  • Management Delegation
  • UNMAP
  • Write Cache
  • Full benefits of ReFS on storage spaces for data protection
  • Automatic Data Tiering with commodity SSD (ever cheaper & bigger) and SAS disks perhaps even the Near Line ones (less power & cooling, great capacity)
  • Potential for JBOD redundancy

Look at that feature set people, in box, delivered by Windows. Sweet! Combine this with 10Gbps networking and DELL has not only a SOFS building block in their port folio, it also offers significant storage features in this package. I for one would like them to do so and not miss out on this opportunity to offer even more capabilities in an attractive price package. Dell could be the very first OEM to grab this new market opportunity by supporting the scale out approach and out maneuver their competitors

Anything Else?

Combine such a building block as described above with their unmatched logistical force for distribution and support this will be a hit a a prime choice for Windows shops. They already have the 10Gbps networking gear & features (DCB) in the PowerConnect 81XX & Force10 S4810 switches. It could be an unbeatable price / capabilities / feature combo that would sell very well.

If we go for SOFS we might need more storage in a single building block with a 4 node cluster. Extensibility might be nice for this. More not just as in capacity but I need to work out the IOPS the available configurations can give us.