Category Archives: vRSS

NIC Firmware/Driver Updates Reset Your RSS/VMQ optimizations

Posted on by
Reply

When optimizing your RSS/VMQ settings for maximum performance you’ll normally (I hope) do this in PowerShell. Save that script with some comments on why you configure it that way and make it part of your Hyper-V host deployment scripts

Why? Automation is king but you’ll need it again for sure. Why? Well there is this “tendency” that NIC firmware/driver updates reset your RSS/VMQ optimizations back to their defaults.That’s a bit of a bummer if you have to redo all the work instead of having a script ready to go. I have seen many a deployment where the configuration was missing after firmware/driver upgrades so please, check!

image

Figure: Where has my optimized configuration gone after a driver/firmware upgrade?

The good news is this isn’t a show stopper issue as things will keep working, but without your optimizations and with VMQ, depending on your NIC team setup for the vSwitch issues might occur. When doing NIC teaming for your virtual switch it’s important to get it right.  With switch dependent teaming (LACP/Static) the NICs in the team need to use overlapping processor sets (Min Queues). When doing switch independent teaming the NICs in the team need to use non-overlapping processor sets. So you need to configure each NIC in your team to use the different processors (Sum of Queues).

On top of that you might want to / should separate RSS/VMQ cores from each other. SMB Direct for CSV/LM will also help achieve this as there we leverage CPU offloading to the NIC.

Live Migration over SMB Direct leaves more CPU cycles for Virtual RSS (vRSS) in Windows Server 2012 R2

Posted on by
4

I recently (January 22nd 2014) gave a WebCast presentation for the Dutch Windows Management User Group (@WMUG_NL) in which I made the case for using SMB Direct with Live Migration to save CPU cycles other (VM) workloads. There are several areas where the CPU cycles are better spent but I used vRSS to show case one scenario.

We’re using a 2 node Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V cluster on Dell PowerEdge R720 servers with Mellanox ConnectX-3 (CSV  &  live migration) and Intel X520-DA (Hyper-V switch), all 10Gbps.

This is what a CPU bottleneck looks like that can be solved by using vRSS in Windows Server 2012 R2.image

The host machines are Hyper Threading enabled. The virtual switch is attached to a switch independent NIC team with dynamic mode. In this setup it’s normal that the sending VM is leveraging both members while the receiving VM traffic is coming in over one member of the host team.

No let’s enable vRSS in the VM and see what this does for this picture.image

Pretty impressive isn’t it. DidierTest03 is the sending VM running on host A and DidierTest04 is the receiving VM that has vRSS enabled and is running on Host B. For vRSS you need both hosts and VMs to run Windows Server 2012 or Windows 8.1. You can see the load is spread across 7 vCPUs in the VM. DidierTest04 has 8 vCPUs. I configured vRSS in the VM to be able to use 7 vCPUs and leave vCPU 0, the default one, alone to handle those workloads.

image

Given multiple Logical CPUs & vCPUs we can get line speed with 10Gbps inside a virtual machine. This, ladies and gentlemen is a thing of beauty.

Now tell me, if you have business related needs for those CPU cycles why would you not offload the work that needs to be done for live migration to the NIC via SMB direct? This is about getting maximum VM density, performance & ROI form your infrastructure, whilst saving on servers, power and cooling. When you see the smile on your clients or bosses face, just say “you’re welcome” and smile back Open-mouthed smile.