Maximizing File Transfer Performance Using 10Gb Ethernet and Virtualization

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SOURCE SERVER
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offs may or may not be applicable for a
given network environment, but they
do indicate an effective technique for
gaining better performance with fewer
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to work with the Linux community to
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
processors will have a new instruction set
enhancement to improve performance for
Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) bulk

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rates when bulk encryption is turned on

Best Practices for Native Linux
Follow these practices to achieve the best
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Configuration: PCIe Gen1 x8 minimum
for 1x 10G port; PCIe Gen2 x8 minimum
for 2x 10G ports on one card
BIOS settings: Turn ON Energy Efficient
mode (Turbo, EIST), SMT, NUMA
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support (enabled by default in RHEL);
Transmit (Tx) is currently limited to one
queue in RHEL, SLES 11RC supports MQ Tx
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and single-threaded MAC layer
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bulk transfer; defaults to four threads
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overcome tool thread limits and
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(code-named Westmere) and future
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Achieving Native Performance
in a Virtualized Environment
Earlier sections illustrated effective
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performance using various tools in the
Linux native environment and described
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The following sections examine
performance in a virtualized environment
to determine the level of network
throughput that can be achieved for both
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In this virtualized environment, the test
systems are provisioned with VMware
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The test systems are connected back-
to-back over 10G with VMDq enabled in
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team used the same application tools and
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The team used the esxtop utility for
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
Within the virtualized environment, these
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
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without the VMDq feature
CASE 1: One Virtual Machine with
Eight vCPUs and 12 GB RAM
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
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
transfer tools for transferring a directory
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


Similar to the testing done in the native
Linux case, the test team compared the


Figure 8 shows the receive network
throughput and total average CPU
utilization for the micro-benchmark, such
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

native data with the data results in the
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Figure 7.
VM1 (8 vCPU) VM1 (8 vCPU)
File Transfer
Direction

Directly connected
back-to-back
File Transfer
Applications
File Transfer
Applications
 
vSwitch vSwitch
VMware® ESX® 4.0 VMware® ESX® 4.0
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