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

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.

SMB Direct RoCE Does Not Work Without DCB/PFC

Introduction

SMB Direct RoCE Does Not Work Without DCB/PFC. “Yes”, you say, “we know, this is well documented. Thank you.” but before you sign of hear me out.

Recently I plugged to RoCE cards into some test servers and linked them to a couple of 10Gbps switches. I did some quick large file copy testing and to my big surprise RDMA kicked in with stellar performance even before I had installed the DCB feature, let alone configure it. So what’s the deal here. Does it work without DCB? Does the card fail back to iWarp? Highly unlikely. I was expecting it to fall back to plain vanilla 10Gbps and not being used at all but it was. A short shout out to Jose Barreto to discuss this helped clarify this.

DCB/PFC is a requirement RoCE

The more busy the network gets the faster the performance will drop. Now in our test scenario we had two servers  for a total of 4 RoCE ports on the network consisting of a beefy 48 port 10Gbps switches. So we didn’t see the negative results of this here.

DCB (Data Center Bridging) and Priority Flow Control are considered a requirement for any kind of RoCE deployment. RDMA with RoCE operates at the Ethernet layer. That means there is no overhead from TCP/IP, which is great for performance. This is the reason you want to use RDMA actually. It also means it’s left on it’s own to deal with Ethernet-level collisions and errors. For that it needs DCB/PFC other wise you’ll run into performance issues due to a ton of retries at the higher network layers.

The reason that iWarp doesn’t require DCB/PCF is that it works at the TCP/IP level also offloaded by using a TCP/IP stack on the NIC instead of the OS. So errors are handled by TCP/IP at a cost: iWarp results in the same benefits as RoCE but it doesn’t scale that well. Not that iWarp performance is lousy, far form! Mind you, for bandwidth management reasons,you’d be better of using DCB or some form of QoS as well.

Conclusion

So no, not configuring  DCB on your servers and the switches isn’t an option, but apparently it isn’t blocked either so beware of this. It might appear to be working fine but it’s a bad idea. Also don’t think it defaults back to iWarp mode, it doesn’t, as one card does one thing not both. There is no shortcut. RoCE RDMA does not work error free out of the box so you do have the install the DCB feature and configure it together with the switches.

MVP Carsten Rachfahl Visits & Interviews Me On Networking & Storage in Windows Server 2012

Last month Carsten (MVP – Virtual Machine) & Kerstin Rachfahl (MVP – Office 365) visited me in my home town. Apart from a short visit to the historic center & a sushi diner amongst friends we also did an interview where we discussed our ongoing Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V activities. We’re trying to leverage as much of the product we can to get the best TCO & ROI and as early adopters we’ve been reaping the benefits form the day the RTM bits were available to us. So far that has been delivering great results. Funny to hear me mention the Fast Track designs as a week later we saw version 3 of those at MMS2013. The most interesting to me about those was the fact that the small & medium sizes focus on Cluster in a Box and Storage Spaces!

While we were having fun talking about the above we also enjoyed some of the most beautiful landmarks of the City of Ghent as a back drop for the interview. It was filmed in a meeting room at AGIV, to whom I provide Infrastructure services with a great team of colleagues. Just click the picture to view the video.

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You can also enjoy the video on Carsten’s blog http://www.hyper-v-server.de/videos/interview-mit-didier-van-hoye-ber-seinen-storage-netwerk-und-mehr/ All I need to do now is to arrange for Carsten to physically touch the Compellent storage I think.

SMB 3.0 Multichannel Auto Configuration In Action With RDMA / SMB Direct

Most of you might remember this slide by Jose Barreto on SMB Multichannel  Auto Configuration in one of his many presentations:image

  • Auto configuration looks at NIC type/speed => Same NICs are used for RDMA/Multichannel (doesn’t mix 10Gbps/1Gbps, RDMA/non-RDMA)
  • Let the algorithms work before you decide to intervene
  • Choose adapters wisely for their function

You can fine tune things if and when needed (only do this when this is really the case) but let’s look at this feature in action.

So let’s look at this in real life. For this test we have 2 * X520 DA 10Gbps ports using 10.10.180.8X/24 IP addresses and 2 * Mellanox  10Gbps RDMA adaptors with 10.10.180.9X/24 IP addresses. No teaming involved just multiple NIC ports. Do not that these IP addresses are on different subnet than the LAN of the servers. Basically only the servers can communicate over them, they don’t have a gateway, no DNS servers and are as such not registered in DNS either (live is easy for simple file sharing).

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Let’s try and copy a 50Gbps fixed VHDX file from server1 to server2 using the DNS name of the target host (pixelated), meaning it will resolve to that host via DNS and use the LAN IP address 10.10.100.92/16 (the host name is greyed out). In the below screenshot you see that the two RDMA capable cards are put into action. The servers are not using  the 1Gbps LAN connection. Multichannel looked at the options:

  • A 1Gbps RSS capable Link
  • Two 10Gbps RSS capable Links
  • Two 10Gbps RDMA capable links

Multichannel concluded the RDMA card is the best one available and as we have two of those it use both. In other words it works just like described.

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Even if we try to bypass DNS and we copy the files explicitly via the IP address (10.10.180.84)  assigned to the Intel X520 DA cards Multichannel intelligence detects that it has two better cards  that provide RDMA available and as you can see it uses the same NICs  as in the demo before.  Nifty isn’t it Smile

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If you want to see the other NICs in action we can disable the Mellanox card and than Multichannel will choose the two X520 DA cards. That’s fine for testing but in real life you need a better solution when you need to manually define what NICs can be used. This is done using PowerShell Smile (take a look at Jose Barrto’s blog The basics of SMB PowerShell, a feature of Windows Server 2012 and SMB 3.0  for more info).

New-SmbMultichannelConstraint –ServerName SERVER2 –InterfaceAlias “SLOT 6 Port 1”, “SLOT 6 Port 2”

This tells a server it can only use these two NICs which in this example are the two Intel X520 DA 10Gbps cards to access Server2. So basically you configure/tell the client what to use for SMB 3.0 traffic to a certain server. Note the difference in send/receive traffic between RDMA/Native 10Gbps.

On Server1, the client you see this:

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On Server2, the server you see this:

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Which is indeed the constraint set up as we can verify with:

Get-SmbMultichannelConstraint

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We’re done playing so let’s clean up all the constraints:

Get-SmbMultichannelConstraint | Remove-SmbMultichannelConstraint

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Seeing this technology it’s now up to the storage industry to provide the needed  capacity and IOPS I a lot more affordable way. Storage Spaces have knocked on your door, that was the wake up call Winking smile. In an environment where we throw lots of data around we just love SMB 3.0