Category Archives: Windows Server 2012 R2

Presenting at ITProceed 2015 & E2EVC 2015 Berlin on SMB Direct

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You cannot afford to ignore SMB3 and it’s capabilities related to storage traffic such as multichannel, RDMA and encryption. SMB Direct over RoCE seems to have a bright future as it continuous to evolve and improve in Windows Server 2106. The need for DCB (PFC and optionally ETS) intimidates some people. But it should not.

I’ll be putting SMB Direct & RoCE into perspective at ITPROCEED | Welcome to THE IT Pro Event of the year! and #E2EVC E2EVC 2015 Berlin, June 12-14, 2015 Berlin, Germany, sharing experiences, tips and demos!  Come see PFC & ETS in action and learn what it can do for you. Storage vendors should most certainly consider supporting all features of SMB 3 natively as a competitive advantage. So Join me for the talk “SMB Direct – The Secret Decoder Ring”.

All these talks are at extremely affordable community driven events to make sure you can attend. The sessions are given by speakers who do this for the community (speakers and attendees do this in their own time and pay for their our own travel/expenses) and who work with these technology in real life and provide feedback to vendors on the issues or opportunities we see. This makes the sessions very interesting and anything but marketing, slide ware or sales pitches. See you there!

Jumbo Frame Settings & Slow or Failing Live Migrations over SMB Direct

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The Problem

I recently had to trouble shoot a Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V cluster where SMB Direct is leveraged for live migration. It seemed to work, sometime perfectly but at times it but it was in “slow” motion. The VMs got queued for live migration, it took some time for it started and sometimes it would finish or it would fail. This did not happen between all the nodes. I diligently checked out the SMB Direct network but that was OK on all nodes. Basically the LM network was perfectly fine.

To me this indicated that the hosts potentially had issues communicating with each other to coordinate the live migration. But pings and such looked good, there was connectivity, on the surface all seemed well.  In the event log details we saw indications that this was indeed the case. Unfortunately I did not get the opportunity to take screenshots or copies of the events in this particular situation.

The nodes had a separate 2*1Gbps native team LAN access and backups. But diving deeper I noticed that they had set Jumbo Frames on some of those member NICs and not on others. So these setting differed from node to node and that was leading to the symptoms we described above.

Conclusion

You can use Jumbo Frames on your live migration network. Testing has shown this to be beneficial. When you’re doing SMB direct it won’t make such a big difference but it doen not hurt. When SMB Direct fails you’ll fall back to SMB with Multichannel and there it helps more! See Live Migration Can Benefit From Jumbo Frames. While SMB Direct (infiniband, RoCE & iWarp) know Jumbo frames the limited testing I have ever done there indicates only a small increase (2%) in throughput so I’m not sure it’s even worthwhile when doing RDMA.

When you can use Jumbo Frames on you host LAN NIC or team of NICs (handy is you use it to do backups as well)  you need to be consistent end to end. Meaning ALL hosts, ALL NICS & all switches/ switch ports. Being inconsistent in this on the cluster nodes  was what cause the slow to failing live migrations. You need to have good communications between the hosts themselves and AD. Just unplug the LAN from a Hyper-V cluster host to demo this => live migration from to that node and the rest of the cluster won’t work. Mismatching Jumbo Frames or potentially other network settings make this less obvious.  Another “fun” example to trouble shoot is a NIC team where the member NICs are in different VLANs.

Hyper-V and Disk Fragmentation

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There are 3 type of disk fragmentation you might need to deal with in regards to Hyper-V:

  1. Fragmentation of the file system on the host LUN where the VMs reside.
  2. Fragmentation of files system on the LUNs inside of the VM.
  3. Block fragmentation of the VHDX itself. This is potentially more of an issue with dynamic disks and differencing disks.

We deal with the first type by defragmenting the LUN, which might be a CSV, in which case you can take a look here for more information on this Defragmenting your CSV Windows 2012 R2 Style with Raxco Perfect Disk 13 SP2.  For more information on fragmentation in general take a look here What’s New in Defrag for Windows Server 2012/2012R. The second type is business as usual and is similar to the first one except that it’s the file system inside a VM.

For the third type we need to create a new virtual disk using the fragmented one as the source. See Checking and Correcting Virtual Hard Disk Fragmentation. This easily done but it does cause down time unless you leverage storage live migration. So that’s my preferred method, especially as I leverage ODX when I do this, so it’s pretty fast. So always leave yourself some margin on storage to be able to perform maintenance operations. That has always been true and still is.

But how do you find out that you have this issue? PowerShell is your friend! Here’s a snippet to show you can check all VMs their vhdx files on a cluster:

$AllVMsOnAllNodesInCluster = Get-VM -ComputerName (get-ClusterNode)
ForEach ($VM in $AllVMsOnAllNodesIncluster)
{
    $VM.Name
    #$HardDrives  = $VM.HardDrives
    invoke-command -ComputerName $VM.computername -ScriptBlock {
        param ($VM)
        Get-VM -Name $VM.Name | Get-VMHardDiskDrive | Get-VHD | ft path, fragmentationpercentage -AutoSize
    } -arg $VM
}

Here’s a screenshot of some output of this snippet

image

As said the best solution that does not incur down time is to storage (live) migrate the virtual disks affected. We can automate this and put in some logic to do this for all virtual hard disks that are more than X% fragmented. Do take care to also check for disk space or the migration will fail.

Hope this helps some of you!

DCB PFC Demo with SMB Direct over RoCE (RDMA)

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In this blog post we’ll demo Priority Flow control. We’re using the demo comfit as described in SMB Direct over RoCE Demo – Hosts & Switches Configuration Example

There is also a quick video to illustrate all this on Vimeo. It’s not training course grade I know, but my time to put into these is limited.

I’m using Mellanox ConnectX-3 ethernet cards, in 2 node DELL PowerEdge R720 Hyper- cluster lab. We’ve configured the two ports for SMB Direct & set live migration to leverage them both over SMB Direct. For that purpose we tagged SMB Direct traffic with priority 4 and all other traffic with priority 1. We only made priority lossless as that’s required for RoCE and the other traffic will deal with not being lossless by virtue of being TCP/IP.

Priority Flow Control is about making traffic lossless. Well some traffic. While we’d love to live by Queens lyrics “I want it all, I want it all and I want it now” we are limited. If not so by our budgets, than most certainly by the laws of physics. To make sure we all understand what PFC does here’s a quick reminder: It tells the sending party to stop sending packets, i.e. pause a moment (in our case SMB Direct traffic) to make sure we can handle the traffic without dropping packets. As RoCE is for all practical purposes Infiniband over Ethernet and is not TCP/IP, so you don’t have the benefits of your protocol dealing with dropped packets, retransmission … meaning the fabric has to be lossless*. So no it DOES NOT tell non priority traffic to slow down or stop. If you need to tell other traffic to take a hike, you’re in ETS country 🙂

* If any switch vendor tells you to not bother with DCB and just build (read buy their switches = $$$$$) a lossless fabric (does that exist?) and rely on the brute force quality of their products to have a lossless experience … could be an interesting experiment Smile.

Note: To even be able to start SMB Direct SMB Multichannel must be enabled as this is the mechanism used to identify RDMA capabilities after which a RDMA connection is attempted. If this fails you’ll fall back to SMB Multichannel. So you will have ,network connectivity.

You want RDMA to work and be lossless. To visualize this we can turn to the switch where we leverage the counter statistics to see PFC frames being send or transmitted. A lab example from a DELL PowerConnect 8100/N4000 series below.

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To verify that RDMA is working as it should we should also leverage the Mellanox Adapter Diagnostic and native Windows RDMA Activity counters. First of all make sure RDMA is working properly. Basically you want the error counters to be zero and stay that way.

Mellanox wise these must remain at zero (or not climb after you got it right):

  • Responder CQE Errors
  • Responder Duplicate Request Received
  • Responder Out-Of-Order Sequence Received
  • … there’s lots of them …

image

Windows RDMA Activity wise these should be zero (or not climb after you got it right):

  • RDMA completion Queue Errors
  • RDMA connection Errors
  • RDMA Failed connection attempts

image

The event logs are also your friend as issues will log entries to look out for like

PowerShell is your friend (adapt severity levels according to your need!)

Get-WinEvent -ListLog “*SMB*” | Get-WinEvent | ? { $_.Level -lt 4 -and $_. Message -like “*RDMA*” } | FL LogName, Id, TimeCreated, Level, Message

Entries like this are clear enough, it ain’t working!

The network connection failed.
Error: The I/O request was canceled.
Connection type: Rdma
Guidance:
This indicates a problem with the underlying network or transport, such as with TCP/IP, and not with SMB. A firewall that blocks port 445 or 5445 can also cause this issue.
 
RDMA interfaces are available but the client failed to connect to the server over RDMA transport.
Guidance:
Both client and server have RDMA (SMB Direct) adaptors but there was a problem with the connection and the client had to fall back to using TCP/IP SMB (non-RDMA).

 

To view PFC action in Windows we rely on the Mellanox Adapter QoS Counters

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Below you’ll see the number of  pause frames being sent & received on each port. Click on the image to enlarge.

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An important note trying to make sense of it all: … pauze and receive frames are sent and received hop to hop. So if you see a pause frame being sent on a server NIC port you should see them being received on the switch port and not on it’s windows target you are live migrating from. The 4 pause frames sent in the screenshot above are received by the switchport as you can see from the PFC Stats for that port.

image

People, if you don’t see errors in the error counters and event viewer that’s good. If you see the PFC Pause frame counters move up a bit that’s (unless excessive) also good and normal, that PFC doing it’s job making sure the traffic is lossless. If they are zero and stay zero for ever you did not buy a lossless fabric that doesn’t need DCB, it’s more likely you DCB/PFC is not working Winking smile and you do not have a lossless fabric at all. The counters are cumulative over time so they don’t reset to zero bar resetting the NIC or a reboot.

image

When testing feel free to generate lots of traffic all over the place on the involved ports & switches this helps with seeing all this in action and verifying RDMA/PFC works as it should. I like to use ntttcp.exe to generate traffic, the most recent version will let you really put a load on 10GBps and higher NICs. Hammer that network as hard as you can Winking smile.

Again a simple video to illustrate this on Vimeo.