Intel Ethernet Cloud White Paper

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Best Practices for Simplifying

Your Cloud Network

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Cloud computing represents an evolution of data center virtualization, where services

and data reside in shared, dynamically scalable resource pools available to any

authenticated device over the Internet or within an internal network. The computing

industry has begun to provide technologies for cloud services to build on core

virtualization benets including abstraction, scalability, and mobility.

Organizations that implement cloud computing can create automated, dynamically

adjustable capacity on demand. The elasticity they realize as a result delivers cost

and agility benets, provided they can meet the key challenges they face during the

transition. This can be accomplished in part by following a strategic approach of creating

standards-based systems that are simplied, efcient, and secure.

Many organizations are following the lead of public cloud services

such as Amazon EC2* and Microsoft Azure* to create private cloud

infrastructures behind their own rewalls for internal use.

Those private cloud networks typically position IT organizations as

internal service providers in their own right, delivering services

within their organizations on a per-use basis. This paper provides

best practices for private cloud networking, established through

research and real-world implementations by Intel.

Today’s Intel® Ethernet

10 Gigabit Server Adapters

can greatly reduce networking

complexity in private cloud

environments. To deliver robust

and reliable cloud services,

dramatic optimizations in

networking can be attained by

leveraging the right intelligent

offloads and technologies

within Intel® Ethernet devices.

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Cloud Computing

Summary of content (12 pages)

PAGE 1
WHITE PAPER Intel® Ethernet 10 Gigabit Server Adapters Cloud Computing Best Practices for Simplifying Your Cloud Network Maximize the networking benefit in private cloud infrastructures Today’s Intel® Ethernet 10 Gigabit Server Adapters can greatly reduce networking complexity in private cloud environments. To deliver robust and reliable cloud services, dramatic optimizations in networking can be attained by leveraging the right intelligent offloads and technologies within Intel® Ethernet devices.
PAGE 2
Best Practices for Simplifying Your Cloud Network Table of Contents Best Practices Transform Networking to Meet Cloud Challenges. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Simplification Meets the Challenges of Complexity and Cost. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Efficiency Meets the Challenges of Scalability and Quality of Service. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Best Practices for Simplifying Your Cloud Network Simplification Meets the Challenges of Complexity and Cost Building out virtualized and cloud infrastructures does not inherently reduce complexity. On the contrary, structured design practices are needed, which can eliminate the need for multiple fabrics and enable many cables and connections to be converged onto a single fabric type and potentially a single wire.
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Best Practices for Simplifying Your Cloud Network Best Practice #1: Consolidate Ports and Cables Where Appropriate The increasing compute capacity of servers drives the need for larger amounts of data throughput to maximize platform-utilization levels. In organizations that have standardized on GbE server adapters, that need for connectivity and bandwidth can lead to very high physical port counts per server, and the use of 8–12 GbE server adapter ports per server is not uncommon.
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Best Practices for Simplifying Your Cloud Network Best Practice #2: Converge Data and Storage onto Ethernet Fabrics Significant efficiencies are possible by passing storage traffic over Ethernet, as shown in Figure 2. This approach simplifies the server configurations to one fabric technology (Ethernet), providing for cost-effective, optimized transmission of all data streams—LAN, management, and storage.
PAGE 6
Best Practices for Simplifying Your Cloud Network But How Will FCoE Perform Compared to Fibre Channel? As a proof-of-concept test, Yahoo! compared the performance of Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) networking with native Fibre Channel. The goal of this testing was to determine whether the cost and flexibility advantages of FCoE were accompanied by significant trade-offs in read/write speed or throughput. The raw performance results are summarized in Figure A:1 1.
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Best Practices for Simplifying Your Cloud Network 10GbE provides the means to increase raw bandwidth, but to use the effective bandwidth across the VMs, optimizations are required in the virtualized environment. Intel® Virtualization for Connectivity (Intel® VT-c) provides these virtualization capabilities in the Intel Ethernet silicon.
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Best Practices for Simplifying Your Cloud Network I/O Virtualization with Intel® VT-c Intel® Virtualization Technology for Connectivity (Intel® VT-c) supports both approaches to I/O virtualization that are used by leading hypervisors, as shown in Figure B: • Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) is a PCI-SIG standard that virtualizes physical I/O ports of a network controller into multiple virtual functions (VFs), which it maps to individual VMs, enabling them to achieve near-native network I/O performan
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Best Practices for Simplifying Your Cloud Network Best Practice #4: Enable a Solution That Works with Multiple Hypervisors As is typical in IT organizations, requirements and solutions evolve and change over time. Supporting multiple hypervisors in a private cloud is a key enabling capability for optimizing and transitioning your data center, as shown in Figure 4.
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Best Practices for Simplifying Your Cloud Network Best Practice #5: Utilize QoS for Multi-Tenant Networking to QoS considerations related to IT’s responsibility to guarantee virtual network services such as storage, management, and applications. This includes the management of multiple traffic classes that exist on a single physical port and that have individual requirements in terms of latency, priority, and packet delivery.
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Best Practices for Simplifying Your Cloud Network hypervisor. While 10GbE typically provides ample bandwidth for these multiple traffic streams to coexist, policies must be put in place to ensure appropriate allocation of network resources in the event of traffic spikes and congestion. Bandwidth limiting within a VM or virtual switch enables separate guarantees to be set up on a per-VM (per-customer) basis. They can be controlled either in software or in hardware.
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Best Practices for Simplifying Your Cloud Network Take the Next Step For more information about Intel® Ethernet 10GbE Server Adapters, visit www.intel.com/go/10GbE To learn more about Intel’s efforts to make cloud infrastructure simple, efficient, and secure, visit www.intel.com/go/cloud 1 Results provided by EMC Corp and Yahoo Inc. 2 Available on select Intel® Ethernet Controllers; see http://www.intel.com/network/connectivity/vtc_vmdq.htm. 3 Test Configuration: Ixia IxChariot* v7.