This paper will highlight the improvements that SolarStorm's virtualization acceleration can provide, not only in networking I/O performance, but also in server efficiency.
Solving the Hypervisor Network I/O Bottleneck
Solarflare Virtualization Acceleration
White PaperBy: Gary Gumanow9 October 2007SF-101233-TMWith increased pressure on IT departments to do more with less, IT is turning to server virtualization to Ignett rthoed muocsttioount of their server platforms. The adoption of virtualization technology to address these business conditions in enterprise data centers has lead to improvements in scalability, manageability, and availability.
Solarflare's SolarStormT 10 Gigabit vNIC controllers are built from the ground up to alleviate the I/O bottleneck in a virtualized environment and can provide up to three times the network I/O performance when compared with a non-accelerated virtualized environment.
This paper will highlight the improvements that SolarStorm's virtualization acceleration can provide, not only in networking I/O performance, but also in server efficiency.
As servers become more powerful, IT departments arecTohneso Plirdoatbinlge mworkloads on fewer and fewer servers utilizing virtualization software techniques. Over the past ten years, the scale-out server model based upon standards-based high-volume components has been a very successful tool for delivering higher performance. Along the way applications have been tuned to maximize the benefits of this scale-out data center model. However, this scale-out or server sprawl has added to the complexity and cost of managing data centers, and IT managers are now moving to consolidate the number of physical servers. IT shops can now achieve higher Figure 1 - All network I/O goes through the performance from the same or smaller data center footprint. hypervisor and becomes the bottleneck.
Before virtualization, each server and application had dedicated bandwidth and hardware access to the network through its network adapter and switch port. Consolidating applications onto fewer servers requires applications to share that host's physical hardware (network adapter and bandwidth).
Virtualized or shared network I/O cannot keep up with the number of applications consolidated. This is often compounded even further by the need to provide even greater I/O bandwidth for storage networking, negating the benefit of server consolidation. In effect, IT resource concerns of data center power and cooling, is now replaced with concerns over network I/O performance (Figure 1). A new approach is needed to breakthrough this I/O bottleneck on a virtualized server platform.
Page | 2SolarStormT virtualization accelerationThe virtualization acceleration provided by Solarflare's SolarStormT 10GbE vNIC controller offloads the I/O burden of the hypervisor. SolarStormT virtualization acceleration (SVA) is an integrated hardware and software solution of the SolarStorm vNIC controller, along with modifications made by the hypervisor OS vendors (Figure 2). SVA provides a bypass from the virtual machine network driver directly to the SolarStorm 10GbE vNIC controller, bypassing the hypervisor. This moves network I/O processorresources from the hypervisor to the VM's, more effectively utilizes today's multi-core architectures, and thus allows for further consolidation of physical servers.
This also frees the hypervisor to be more efficient and responsive, as well as, to perform other tasks, such as, management tasks, monitoring the health of virtual machines, migrating virtual machines, and providing Figure 2 - SVA offloads network I/O traffic and preserves hypervisor management resources.security functions.
The PCI-SIG specification for PCI-IOV* is currently under development and Solarflare plans to support this industry standard when it becomes ratified. PCI-IOV is complementary to SVA and is not expected to impact the SVA architecture. Acceleration from PCI-IOV is expected to deliver the same virtualized performance and efficiency as SVA. See Figure 3.
How SVA Works Figure 3 - Virtualization acceleration stages and The SolarStorm controller establishes a vNIC relative performance(virtual NIC) for each virtual machine in hardware, thus communicating with that virtual machine network driver directly. Each vNIC in this case could be considered a network queue or stream, with its own memory protection and security. TheSolarStorm vNIC controller supports up to 4096 vNICs while other 10GbE controllers on the market today support only 16 virtual connections.
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