Category Archives: NIC Teaming

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.

Configuring Performance Options for Live Migration In Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview

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New Options For Optimizing Live Migrations

In Windows Server 2012 R2 we have a whole range of options to leverage Live Migration of our environment and needs. Next to the new default (Compression) we can now also leverage SMB 3.0 (Multichannel, RDMA) for all forms of Live Migration and not just for Shared Nothing Live Migration  (see  Shared Nothing Live Migration Leverages SMB 3.0 Under the Hood) or Storage Live Migration when both the source and the target are SMB 3.0 storage.

TCP/IP

Here you can use a one NIC or a NIC Team for bandwidth aggregation for live migration (see  Teamed NIC Live Migrations Between Two Hosts In Windows Server 2012 Do Use All Members). This is the process you have known in Windows Server 2012. You can select multiple NICs or even Teams of NICs  but only one of those (one NIC or one Team) will be used. The other(s)will only be used when the first one is not available.

Compression

This option leverages spare CPU cycles to compress the memory contents of virtual machines being migrated. Only then is it sent over the wire via TCP/IP connection. This speeds up the Live Migration Process. This process is CPU load aware so it will only use idle cycles to protect the workload on the hosts. This is the default setting in Hyper-V running on Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview.

SMB

This setting will leverage two SMB 3.0 features. Multichannel and, if supported by and for the NICs involved, RDMA.

  • SMB Direct (RDMA) will be used when the network adapters of both the source and destination servers have Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) capabilities enabled.
  • SMB Multichannel will automatically detect and use multiple connections when a proper SMB Multichannel configuration is identified.

Where to set these options?

In Hyper-V Manager go to “Hyper-V Settings” in the Actions pane.image

Expand the Live Migrations node under Server in the left pane (click the “+”) and select to “Advanced Features”.image

Select the option desired under" “Performance Options”.image

Happy testing!

 

EDIT: Aidan Finn posted the PowerShell commands to configure the performance options in Configuring WS2012 R2 Hyper-V Live Migration Performance Options Using PowerShell The MVP community at work & it rocks Smile

Teamed NIC Live Migrations Between Two Hosts In Windows Server 2012 Do Use All Members

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Introduction

Between this blog NIC Teaming in Windows Server 2012 Brings Simple, Affordable Traffic Reliability and Load Balancing to your Cloud Workloads which states “TCP/IP can recover from missing or out-of-order packets. However, out-of-order packets seriously impact the throughput of the connection. Therefore, teaming solutions make every effort to keep all the packets associated with a single TCP stream on a single NIC so as to minimize the possibility of out-of-order packet delivery. So, if your traffic load comprises of a single TCP stream (such as a Hyper-V live migration), then having four 1Gb/s NICs in an LACP team will still only deliver 1 Gb/s of bandwidth since all the traffic from that live migration will use one NIC in the team. However, if you do several simultaneous live migrations to multiple destinations, resulting in multiple TCP streams, then the streams will be distributed amongst the teamed NICs” and other information out their such as support forum replies it is dictated that when you live migrate between two nodes in a cluster only one stream is active and you will never exceed the bandwidth of a single team member. When running some simple tests with a 10Gbps NIC team this seems true. We also know that you can consume near to all of the aggregated bandwidth of the members in a NIC Team for live migration if you these conditions are met:

1. The Live Migrations must not all be destined for the same remote machine. Live migration will only use one TCP stream between any pair of hosts. Since both Windows NIC Teaming and the adjacent switch will not spread traffic from a single stream across multiple interfaces live migration between host A and host B, no matter how many VMs you’re migrating, will only use one NIC’s bandwidth.

2. You must use Address Hash (TCP ports) for the NIC Teaming. Hyper-V Port mode will put all the outbound traffic, in this case, on a single NIC.

When we look at these conditions and compare them to the behavior we expect from the various forms of NIC teaming in Windows 2012 this is a bit surprising as one might expect all member to be involved. So let’s take a look at some of the different NIC Teaming setups.

Any form of NIC teaming with Hyper-V Port Mode

This one is easy as condition 2 above is very much true. In all my testing with any NIC team configuration in the Hyper-V Port mode traffic distribution algorithms I have not been able to exceed 10Gbps. I have seen no difference between dependent static of LACP mode or switch independent (active-active) for this condition. As you can see in the screenshot below, the traffic maxes out at 10Gbps.

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This is also demonstrated in the following screenshots taking with the resource manager where you can see only half of the bandwidth of the Team is being used.

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Exceeding a single NIC team member’s bandwidth when migrating between 2 nodes

The first condition of the previous heading doesn’t seem true. In some easy testing with a low number of virtual machines and not too much memory assigned you never exceed the bandwidth of one 10Gbps NIC team member. So on the surface, with some quick testing it might seem that way.

But during testing on a 2 node cluster with dual port 10Gbps cards and I have found the following

Switch Dependent LACP and Static

  1. Take a sufficient number of large memory virtual machines to exceed the capacity of a single 10Gbps pipe for a longer time (that way you’ll see it in the GUI).
  2. Live migrate them all from host A to host B (“Pause” with “Drain Roles” or “select all” + “Move”)
  3. Note that with a 2 node cluster there is no possibility to Live Migrate to multiple nodes simultaneous. It’s A to or B or B to A or both at the same time.

Basically it didn’t take long to see well over 10Gbpsbeing used. So the information out there seems to be wrong. Yes we can leverage the aggregated bandwidth when we migrate from host A to host B as long as we have enough memory assigned to the VMs and we migrate a sufficient number of them. Switch dependent teaming, whether it is static or LACP does its job as you would expect.

Let’s think about this. The number of VMs you need to lie migrate to see > 10Gbpss used is not fixed in stone. Could it be that there is some intelligence in the Live Migration algorithm where it decides to set up multiple streams when a certain number of virtual machines with sufficient memory are migrated as the sorting is mitigated by the amount of bandwidth that can leveraged? Perhaps he VMMS.EXE kicks off more streams when needed/beneficial? Further experimenting indicates that this is not the case. All you need is > 1 VM being live migrated. When looking at this in task manager you do need them to be of sufficient memory size and/or migrate enough of them to make it visible. I have also tried playing with the number of allowed simultaneous live migrations to see if this has an effect but I did not find one (i.e. 4, 6 or 12).

It looks like it is more like one TCP/IP connection per Live Migration that is indeed tied to one NIC member. So when you live migrate VMS between two hosts you see one VM live migration go over 1 member and the other the other as static/LACP switch dependent teaming did does its job. When you do enough live migrations of large VMs simultaneously you see this in Task Manager as shown below. In this case as each VM live migration stream sticks to a NIC team member you do not need to worry about out of order packets impacting performance.

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But to make sure and to prevent falling victim to the fall victim to the limits of the task manger GUI during testing this behavior we also used performance monitor to see what’s going on. This confirms we are indeed using both 10Gbps NIC team member on both the target and the source host server. This is even the case with 2 virtual machines Live Migration. As long as it’s more than one and the memory assigned is enough to make the live migration last long enough you can see it in Task Manager; otherwise it might miss it. Performance Monitor however does not..clip_image012

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This is interesting and frankly a bit unexpected as the documentation on this subject is not reflecting this. However it IS in agreement with the NIC teaming documented behavior for other tan Live Migration traffic. We took a closer look however and can reproduce this over and over again. Again we tested both switch dependent static and LACP modes and we found the behavior to be the same.

Switch Independent with Address Hash

Let’s test Live Migration over switch independent teaming with Address Hash. Here we see that the source server sends on the two member of the NIC team but that the target server receives on only one. This is normal behavior for switch independent teaming. But from the documentation we expect that one member on the source server would send and one member on the target server would receive. Not so.

Basically with Windows Server 2012 this doesn’t give you any benefit for throughput. You are limited to the bandwidth of one member, i.e. 10Gbps.

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Red is Total Bytes received on the target host. It’s clear only one member is being used. Green is Bytes Sent/Sec on the source server. As you can see both team members are involved. In a switch independent scenario the receiving side limits the throughput. This is in agreement the documented behavior of switch independent NIC teaming with Address hash.

Helpful documentation on this is Windows Server 2012 NIC Teaming (LBFO) Deployment and Management (A Guide to Windows Server 2012 NIC Teaming for the novice and the expert).

Hope this helps sort out some of the confusion.

Complete VM Mobility Across The Data Center with SMB 3.0, RDMA, Multichannel & Windows Server 2012 (R2)

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Introduction

The moment I figured out that Storage Live Migration (in certain scenarios) and Shared Nothing Live Migration leverage SMB 3.0 and as such Multichannel and RDMA in Windows Server 2012 I was hooked. I just couldn’t let go of the concept of leveraging RDMA for those scenarios.  Let me show you the value of my current favorite network design for some demanding Hyper-V environments. I was challenged a couple of time on the cost/port of this design which is, when you really think of it, a very myopic way of calculating TCO/ROI. Really it is. And this week at TechEd North America 2013 Microsoft announced that all types of Live Migrations support Multichannel & RDMA (next to compression) in Windows Server 2012 R2.  Watch that in action at minute 39 over here at Understanding the Hyper-V over SMB Scenario, Configurations, and End-to-End Performance. You should have seen the smile on my face when I heard that one! Yes standard Live Migration now uses multiple NIC (no teaming) and RDMA for lightning fast  VM mobility & storage traffic. People you will hit the speed boundaries of DDR3 memory with this! The TCO/ROI of our plans just became even better, just watch the session.

So why might I use more than two 10Gbps NIC ports in a team with converged networking for Hyper-V in Windows 2012? It’s a great solution for sure and a combined bandwidth of 2*10Gbps is more than what a lot of people have right now and it can handle a serious workload. So don’t get me wrong, I like that solution. But sometimes more is asked and warranted depending on your environment.

The reason for this is shown in the picture below. Today there is no more limit on the VM mobility within a data center. This will only become more common in the future.

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This is not just a wet dream of virtualization engineers, it serves some very real needs. Of cause it does. Otherwise I would not spend the money. It consumes extra 10Gbps ports on the network switches that need to be redundant as well and you need to have 10Gbps RDMA capable cards and DCB capable switches.  So why this investment? Well I’m designing for very flexible and dynamic environments that have certain demands laid down by the business. Let’s have a look at those.

The Road to Continuous Availability

All maintenance operations, troubleshooting and even upgraded/migrations should be done with minimal impact to the business. This means that we need to build for high to continuous availability where practical and make sure performance doesn’t suffer too much, not noticeably anyway. That’s where the capability to live migrate virtual machines of a host, clustered or not, rapidly and efficiently with a minimal impact to the workload on the hosts involved comes into play.

Dynamics Environments won’t tolerate downtime

We also want to leverage our resources where and when they are needed the most. And the infrastructure for the above can also be leveraged for that. Storage live migration and even Shared Nothing Live Migration can be used to place virtual machine workloads where they are getting the resources they need. You could see this as (dynamically) optimizing the workload both within and across clusters or amongst standalone Hyper-V nodes. This could be to a SSD only storage array or a smaller but very powerful node or cluster in regards to CPU, memory and Disk IO. This can be useful in those scenarios where scientific applications, number crunching or IOPS intesive  software or the like needs them but only for certain times and not permanently.

Future proofing for future storage designs

Maybe you’re an old time fiber channel user or iSCSI rules your current data center and Windows Server 2012 has not changed that. But that doesn’t mean it will not come. The option of using a Scale Out File Server and leverage SMB 3.0 file shares to providing storage for Hyper-V deployments is a very attractive one in many aspects. And if you build the network as I’m doing you’re ready to switch to SMB 3.0 without missing a heart beat. If you were to deplete the bandwidth x number of 10Gbps can offer, no worries you’ll either use 40Gbps and up or Infiniband. If you don’t want to go there … well since you just dumped iSCSI or FC you have room for some more 10Gbps ports Smile

Future proofing performance demands

Solutions tend to stay in place longer than envisioned and if you need some long levity and a stable, standard way of doing networking, here it is. It’s not the most economical way of doing things but it’s not as cost prohibitive as you think. Recently I was confronted again with some of the insanities of enterprise IT. A couple of network architects costing a hefty daily rate stated that 1Gbps is only for the data center and not the desktop while even arguing about the cost of some fiber cable versus RJ45 (CAT5E). Well let’s look beyond the North – South traffic and the cost of aggregating band all the way up the stack with shall we? Let me tell you that the money spent on such advisers can buy you in 10Gbps capabilities in the server room or data center (and some 1Gbps for the desktops to go) if you shop around and negotiate well. This one size fits all and the ridiculous economies of scale “to make it affordable” argument in big central IT are not always the best fit in helping the customers. Think  a little bit outside of the box please and don’t say no out of habit or laziness!

Conclusion

In some future blog post(s) we’ll take a look at what such a network design might look like and why. There is no one size fits all but there are not to many permutations either. In our latest efforts we had been specifically looking into making sure that a single rack failure would not bring down a cluster. So when thinking of the rack as a failure domain we need to spread the cluster nodes across multiple racks in different rows. That means we need the network to provide the connectivity & capability to support this, but more on that later.