Powered by System Center
// Main banner ad on homepage
Posts tagged Networking
Last tickets for Hyper-V.nu event up for grabs
Mar 20th
As you can see from the screenshot, only a few tickets are left for the Hyper-V.nu event on April 16th, 2013. The event will be presented in Dutch which is unfortunate for several of our followers in the neighboring countries who wanted to attend. I hope to convince my fellow speakers to present in English again so the last 15 tickets could have been easily sold by now. The event is free by the way.
If you already know you cannot make it, please return your tickets!
Thanks!
Hans
|
|
Hyper-V Virtual Switch Extension Cisco Nexus 1000V
Mar 2nd
This week is an important day for Microsoft’s new Hyper-V Extensible Switch in Windows Server 2012. We already know this switch is capable of many new features including capturing, filtering and forwarding extensions from several vendors.
Damian Flynn (fellow author on Microsoft Private Cloud Computing and co-author of Windows Server 2012 Installation and Configuration Guide (appearing very soon!), informed me that major networking player Cisco is about to make a big announcement and that Damian will be co-presenting the announcement with Cisco.
On Wednesday March 6th at 6pm CET, Cisco will unveil its greatly anticipated Distributed Switch solution for Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V; the Nexus 1000V.
What is the Nexus 1000V?
Cisco Nexus 1000V Series Switches provide a comprehensive and extensible architectural platform for virtual machine (VM) and cloud networking. The switches are designed to accelerate server virtualization and multitenant cloud deployments in a secure and operationally transparent manner. Integrated into the Windows Server 2012 Extensible Switch, and fully compatible with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 SP1,
Please blog, tweet, and pass on the message, to learn about the Nexus 1000v, and how to join the beta program; grabbing the all-important Beta Code!
For more information, and registration details please follow and share Damian’s link:
http://www.damianflynn.com/2013/03/01/cisco-nexus-1000v-public-beta-program/
|
|
NIC Teaming, Hyper-V switch, QoS and actual performance | part 4 – Traffic classes
Jan 14th
This blog series consists of four parts
- NIC Teaming, Hyper-V switch, QoS and actual performance | part 1 – Theory
- NIC Teaming, Hyper-V switch, QoS and actual performance | part 2 – Preparing the lab
- NIC Teaming, Hyper-V switch, QoS and actual performance | part 3 – Performance
- NIC Teaming, Hyper-V switch, QoS and actual performance | part 4 – Traffic classes
With the insights from the results of the tests, it is possible to look at multiple scenario’s for the traffic classes live migration and virtual machine.
Live migration
Live migration moves machines from one host to another without noticeable downtime. This can be live migration within a cluster or moving virtual machines with “shared nothing” live migration. Live migrations uses one TCP stream for control messages (low throughput) and one TCP stream for transfer of virtual machine memory and state (high throughput utilization). When live migration includes migrating the VHD, SMB will be used for that. SMB itself will use one or multiple TCP streams depending on your SMB multichannel settings.
Scenario 1 : Server with two quad port 1Gb NICs
If you have invested in new 1Gb hardware before Windows Server 2012 was available, upgrading your NICs to 10Gb hardware is not a requirement. The NIC Teaming functionality allows for teaming up to 32 physical NICs. It is possible to reuse the dedicated 1Gb NICs you used for your Windows Server 2008 R2 or your (obsolete!!) VMware environment and create a single team.
The disadvantage with VMQ and LBFO based on Address Hash is that all the settings for the individual physical NICs in the team must be identical. Whereas NIC Teaming based on HyperVPorts allows for overlapping processor settings.
I have tested with additional live migration networks with the same metric in Switch Independent / HyperVPorts mode. Each live migration network will get its own port on the Hyper-V switch allowing for distribution of the individual live migration networks amongst the team members on a round-robin basis.
I created single NIC team with 8 1Gb team members in Switch Independent / HyperVPorts. After configuring a Hyper-V switch on top of this NIC team, I created six live migration networks with the same metric.
I also adjusting the maximum number of simultaneous Live Migration settings to ten simultaneous live migrations on each cluster node. Running a live migration of ten virtual machines (ten high throughput TCP streams) resulted in only one team member being utilized.
Live migration will use only one available network for moving virtual machine memory and state. Even if other live migration networks are configured with the same metric.
With 2 quad port NICs it is possible to create a different configuration for more live migration bandwidth without losing all VMQ overlapping. Create two NIC teams. One team with four 1Gb team members in Switch independent / HyperVPorts and one team with four 1Gb team members in LACP / Address Hash (you might even configure two team member per quad NIC in a single team for added redundancy).
The Switch independent / HyperVPorts NIC team is configured with a Hyper-V switch for converged Fabric. The LACP / Address Hash NIC team is dedicated for live migration. Since there is no Hyper-V switch on top of this NIC team, RSS is used for load balancing the individual stream.
NIC Teaming, Hyper-V switch, QoS and actual performance | part 3 – Performance
Jan 11th
This blog series consists of four parts
- NIC Teaming, Hyper-V switch, QoS and actual performance | part 1 – Theory
- NIC Teaming, Hyper-V switch, QoS and actual performance | part 2 – Preparing the lab
- NIC Teaming, Hyper-V switch, QoS and actual performance | part 3 – Performance
- NIC Teaming, Hyper-V switch, QoS and actual performance | part 4 – Traffic classes
Performance
Part 1 of this blog series explained the theory of NIC Teaming, Hyper-V switch and QoS. Theory is essential but we don’t run Hyper-V clusters in theory. We run them in production. Windows Server 2012 NIC Teaming and converged fabric allows for more bandwidth. Live migration and virtual machines are two traffic classes where more bandwidth can be useful. The following tests will look at the possible configurations to get the most bandwidth out of your Hyper-V environment on these traffic classes.
NIC Teaming to NIC Teaming
Now that we have the tools configured we can run our first test. It is a good idea to do this one step at a time so the differences in configuration will show exactly how this influences the results.
The first step is two create a NIC team on each server and connect them directly to each other. I have used the quad port 1Gb NIC on each server to create NIC team.
Each NIC team is configured in LACP / Address Hash. Running IPerf with a single stream results in a bandwidth of 113 MBytes per second.
As stated before the NIC team will force a single TCP over a single team member, so this is the expected result. Opening performance monitor during the test will verify this.
Adding more streams will balance the sessions over the team members. After adding one TCP stream per test, all four team members were active at ten parallel TCP streams.
NIC Teaming, Hyper-V switch, QoS and actual performance | part 2 – Preparing the lab
Jan 9th
This blog series consists of four parts
- NIC Teaming, Hyper-V switch, QoS and actual performance | part 1 – Theory
- NIC Teaming, Hyper-V switch, QoS and actual performance | part 2 – Preparing the lab
- NIC Teaming, Hyper-V switch, QoS and actual performance | part 3 – Performance
- NIC Teaming, Hyper-V switch, QoS and actual performance | part 4 – Traffic classes
Preparing the lab
The test lab consist of two servers (HP Proliant DL 360 G5, nothing fancy but it will give a good picture on the processor demand). Each server contains a dual port 10Gb NIC and a quad port 1Gb NIC. The NICs have RSS and VMQ support. The quad port 1Gb NIC in the servers are directly connected to each other. This will give the best picture since a switch configuration might interfere with the results.
Performance is influenced by a lot of factors. For example, copying a large file between the servers will not be very representative. Server 2012 supports SMB multichannel, whereby multiple TCP streams are used for a single file copy. This requires Physical NICs with RSS support. SMB multichannel will work with NIC teaming since RSS is exposed through the team on the default interface. The Hyper-V switch does not support RSS and does not expose it to upper level protocols. SMB Multichannel will not function for the vNICs. A file copy initiated from a vNIC is single TCP stream. NIC Teaming is designed a single TCP stream to assign to a single team member. When the file is written to the destination, disk I/O can also impact the performance.
Luckily there are some good tools available for measuring bandwidth. During the tests JPerf will display detailed information on the bandwidth, Performance Monitor shows the load distribution and Task Manager gives insight into the processor load and distribution.
NTttcp, IPerf and JPerf
In my initial test I used NTttcp, that was rewritten by Microsoft in 2008. Microsoft is using an updated version of NTttcp that enables additional parameters, but this updated version is not publicly available. Therefore I resorted to IPerf. IPerf is a commonly used network testing tool that can create multiple TCP streams and measure the bandwidth of a network connection. IPerf can run as a server or as a client. The server listens on port 5001 and one or multiple clients can send a single TCP stream or multiple TCP streams to the server. IPerf was originally created for Linux, but there are compiled version for Windows publicly available. I have used a graphical front end for IPerf called JPerf. JPerf gives some nice graphs but requires Java so I wouldn’t recommend installing it on your production servers. If you want to run the same test in your production environment you can use the compiled version of IPerf (which will leave no footprint on the server) or create two virtual machines and install JPerf inside them.
Installation
If you want to use the command line version of IPerf (no footprint) copy the content of the compiled IPerf version to your server. For JPerf you will need to install Java first. JPerf does not require a separate IPerf file. You can just copy the content of JPerf to your server. Before you can run JPerf you will need to add the path to javaw.exe to the Path variable.
In the System Properties of your server open the Advanced tab and select the Environment Variables. Search for the Path variable and (if you installed Java in the default folder) add ;C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jre7\bin to the end of Path variable.
Now you can open JPerf by running jperf.bat located in the root of folder you copied.
To configure JPerf as receiver select Server as IPerf Mode and click Run IPerf. IPerf listens on port 5001 by default. This port should be allowed in the firewall. With the Num Connections value of 0 IPerf will keep listening on port 5001 after a successful run.
To configure JPerf as sender select Client as IPerf Mode. In the server address specify the IP address of the server where JPerf is in listening mode. During the test I concluded that JPerf will only function on interfaces with a default gateway configured.
NIC Teaming, Hyper-V switch, QoS and actual performance | part 1 – Theory
Jan 8th
This blog series consists of four parts
- NIC Teaming, Hyper-V switch, QoS and actual performance | part 1 – Theory
- NIC Teaming, Hyper-V switch, QoS and actual performance | part 2 – Preparing the lab
- NIC Teaming, Hyper-V switch, QoS and actual performance | part 3 – Performance
- NIC Teaming, Hyper-V switch, QoS and actual performance | part 4 – Traffic classes
One of the basics of every Hyper-V configuration is networking. Set aside the missing flexibility, the choices for a Hyper-V cluster design in Windows Server 2008 R2 were clear. A dedicated network interface for each type of traffic (management, cluster, live migration). With this configuration in production NICs were underutilized most of the time and when you needed the bandwidth it was capped at the maximum of a single interface. In the (rare) case of a NIC dying on you there was no failover. In Windows Server 2008 R2 there was no NIC Teaming support. For load balancing and failover the only option was resorting to the NIC Teaming software provided by the hardware vendor.
From experience I can say that a lot of customers were having trouble designing their networking in a Windows Server 2008 R2 cluster correctly. Problems with 3rd party NIC Teaming, live migration over VM networks, not enough physical adapters, you name it, we’ve seen the most “creative” configurations.
Most customers are stuck in the Windows 2008 R2 thinking pattern. This is understandable as Microsoft strongly recommended that each network in a Windows 2008 R2 Hyper-V cluster had its own dedicated physical NIC in each host.
In Windows Server 2012, NIC Teaming is delivered by Microsoft out of the box. The official term is NIC Teaming, it is also referenced as Load Balancing and Failover (LBFO). NIC Teaming is an integral part of the Windows 2012 operating system. With NIC Teaming you can team multiple NICs into a single interface. You can mix NICs from different vendors, as long as they are physical Ethernet adapters and meet the Windows Logo requirement. The NICs must operate at the same speed. Teaming NICs operating at different speeds is not supported. But flexibility comes with complexity and many choices.
With Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012 it is even possible to create a Hyper-V switch on top of a NIC team. The Hyper-V switch is a full-fledged software based layer 2 switch with features like QOS, port ACLs, 3rd party extensions, resource metering and so on. You can create virtual adapters and attach them to the Hyper-V switch. These developments provide us with the proper tools to create converged fabrics.
What to expect
Usually the first thing tested after initial configuration is copying a large file between two hosts. With a Hyper-V Switch configured on a NIC team composed of two 10Gb adapters you might expect the file to copy with (2 x 10 Gbits / 8 =) 2.5 GBytes per second. When you copy the file you find that actual throughput is a lot lower (about 400 MB/s to 800 MB/s).
The first reaction : it doesn’t work!!
Let me clarify. It’s a little more complicated than just combining two 10Gb NICs and expecting a 2.5 GB/s file copy. It is possible to get these bandwidth results but you need to understand that there are a lot of factors of influence on the actual throughput.
Before we dive in to testing first we will have to look at the choices provided by Windows Server 2012 and how the inner workings of these choices are of influence on the actual bandwidth.
Theory
Transmission Control Protocol
TCP is one of the main protocols in the TCP/IP suite.
Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is a transport protocol (layer 4). TCP provides reliable, ordered delivery of a stream of octets. TCP provides the mechanism to recover from missing or out-of-order packets. Reordering packets generates great impact on the throughput of the connection. Microsoft’s NIC Teaming (or any other serious NIC Teaming solution) will try to keep all packets associated with a single TCP stream on the same NIC to minimize out-of-order packets.
Hardware
There are some NIC hardware functionalities you should be aware of.
Receive side scaling
Receive side scaling (RSS) enables the efficient distribution of network receive processing across multiple processors.
It is possible to specify which processors are used for handling RSS requests. You can check if your current NIC hardware has RSS support by running the following PowerShell Get-SmbServerNetworkInterface
Virtual machine queue
Virtual machine queue (VMQ) creates a dedicated queue on the physical network adapter for each virtual network adapter that requests a queue. Packets that match a queue are placed in that queue. Other packets, along with all multicast and broadcast packets, are placed in the default queue for additional processing in the Hyper-V switch. You should enable VMQ for every virtual machine (and it is enabled by default). The new WS2012 feature, D-VMQ, will automatically assign the queues to the right VMs as needed based on their current activity.
Note Hyper-threaded CPUs on the same core processor share the same execution engine. RSS and VMQ will ignore hyper-threading.
Receive Side Coalescing
Receive Side Coalescing (RSC) improves the scalability of the servers by reducing the overhead for processing a large amount of network I/O traffic by offloading some of the work to network adapters.
For advanced configuration of these NIC hardware features Microsoft has released a great document on performance tuning guidelines for Windows Server 2012.
Jump Starting Windows Server 2012
May 24th
With a new operating system around the corner there is an awful lot to learn. The release candidate of Windows Server 2012 that is expected in the first week of June contains a wealth of new features you have most likely already heard about. I have been able to test a large number of very rich features including Hyper-V, File & Storage and Networking. It is very hard to touch everything in a short period.
Therefore I strongly advise you to register for this Windows Server 2012 Jumpstart which is a two day live virtual class presented by Rick Claus and Corey Hynes.
Day One
Morning | Beyond Virtualization
• Game changers in the next release of the Hyper-V role on Windows Server 2012
• Massive scale increases, networking improvements, replication and disaster recovery is all in the box
Afternoon | Manageability
• Learn how you can manage a few systems up to a hundred – all from one console
• Server Core installs scaring you off? Learn about all your installation and management options
• Windows PowerShell automation and management at scale – all with built in tools
• Clustering—Cluster-aware updating
• Networking, Network Teaming, network configuration, SMB MultiChannel and RDMA
Day Two
Morning | Storage
• Learn how Continuous Availability of File Services improves workload reliability and performance
• Storage groups, disk provisioning, iSCSI and SAN integration
Afternoon | Remote Users
• Remote connectivity options for your workforce (DA)
• VDI and Remote Desktop Services deployment and changes
You can find more details here:
http://borntolearn.mslearn.net/btl/b/weblog/archive/2012/05/23/new-jump-start-who-s-ready-for-windows-2012-register-now.aspx
Jaap Wesselius interviews Hans Vredevoort on Windows 8
Dec 2nd
Just before //build/ NGN invited the Hyper-V.nu crew over for a series of interviews. Jaap Wesselius who originally started the Hyper-V usergroup accepted the role of the interviewer. Peter Noorderijk, Maarten Wijsman and myself were asked to answer Jaap’s questions. Before you start clicking the links …. the interviews are in Dutch, so unless you want to pick up a few words of our beautiful language, head over to some of the other interviews that fellow MVP Carsten Rachfahl held with me this year:
In one of the previous blog you might already have seen the link to the interview with Peter Noorderijk’s on Hyper-V: http://www.ngn.nl/ngn/weblogs/hyper-v-blog/hyper-v-interview-met-peter-noorderijk/?waxtrapp=ybinfpBsHyoOtvOXEGAH
Today also my interview was published on the site of our NGN friends:
http://www.ngn.nl/ngn/weblogs/hyper-v-blog/hyper-v-interview-met-hans-vredevoort/?waxtrapp=okashpBsHyoOtvOXEGAJ
Topics: Windows 8, Hyper-V v3, storage, networking, live storage migration, VMM 2012
We expect the 3rd interview by Jaap with Maarten Wijsman to be published in the near future.
Camera work and editing by Ed Wens
Hyper-V Network Optimizations series is complete
Jul 31st
I recently pointed your attention to a very interesting blog series on Hyper-V Network Optimizations.
In the sixth and final blog on this topic Christian Edwards focuses on monitoring network performance of your virtual machines, virtual switches and physical network adapters.
Here’s a link to my blog post listing the blog series:
http://www.hyper-v.nu/archives/hvredevoort/2011/05/definitive-guide-to-hyper-v-networking-optimizations/
Virtual Connect, NIC’s, VLANs, Teaming… Tips and Tricks
Jun 8th
Configuring networking in Hyper-V is not that smooth as we would like it. You have al the possibilities you need but you need to know where you can configure what option and how you need to configure it. In this blog I will describe some tips and tricks and will show you how you can configure the several network components. This blog is based on a HP Hyper-V server (blade server) which is member of a Hyper-V cluster. The NIC’s (8 pieces) are presented through HP Virtual Connect. The total bandwith I received was 20 GB and I need to share that between the 8 NIC’s.
Twitter
RSS