Are you considering deploying HPE Cloudline servers in your hyper-scale environment? If you are, be aware that HPE now offers select Cavium ™ FastLinQ® 10GbE and 10/25GbE Adapters as options for HPE Cloudline CL2100, CL2200 and CL3150 Gen 10 Servers. The adapters supported on the HPE Cloudline servers are shown in table 1 below.
Faster processors, increase in scale, high performance NVMe and SSD storage and the need for better performance and lower latency have started to shift some of the performance bottlenecks from servers and storage to the network itself.
* Source; Demartek findings
Table 2: Advanced Features in Cavium FastLinQ Adapters for HPE Cloudline
Network Partitioning (NPAR) virtualizes the physical port into eight virtual functions on the PCIe bus. This makes a dual port adapter appear to the host O/S as if it were eight individual NICs. Furthermore, the bandwidth of each virtual function can be fine-tuned in increments of 500Mbps, providing full Quality of Service on each connection. SR-IOV is an additional virtualization offload these adapters support that moves management of VM to VM traffic from the host hypervisor to the adapter. This frees up CPU resources and reduces VM to VM latency.
Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) is an offload that routes I/O traffic directly from the adapter to the host memory. This bypasses the O/S kernel and can improve performance by reducing latency. The Cavium adapters support what is called Universal RDMA, which is the ability to support both RoCEv2 and iWARP protocols concurrently. This provides network administrators more flexibility and choice for low latency solutions built with HPE Cloudline servers.
SmartAN is a Cavium technology available on the 10/25GbE adapters that addresses issues related to bandwidth matching and the need for Forward Error Correction (FEC) when switching between 10Gbe and 25GbE connections. For 25GbE connections, either Reed Solomon FEC (RS-FEC) or Fire Code FEC (FC-FEC) is required to correct bit errors that occur at higher bandwidths. For the details behind SmartAN technology you can refer to the Marvell technology brief here.
For simplified management, Cavium provides a suite of utilities that allow for configuration and monitoring of the adapters that work across all the popular O/S environments including Microsoft Windows Server, VMware and Linux. Cavium’s unified management suite includes QCC GUI, CLI and v-Center plugins, as well as PowerShell Cmdlets for scripting configuration commands across multiple servers. Cavum’s unified management utilities can be downloaded from www.cavium.com .
标签: Cloudline Servers, HPE, HPE Cloudline Servers, HPE ProLiant servers, Network Partitioning