Driving 10 Gigabit Ethernet Adoption in the Data Center

DRIVING 10 GIGABIT ETHERNET ADOPTION IN THE DATA CENTER
4
The Solution
Moving to a 10 Gigabit Ethernet environment has never
been easier. With solutions available from Intel and Extreme
Networks, deploying 10 Gigabit Ethernet in both copper and
fiber infrastructures in the data center is both affordable and
efcient.ByusingIntel10GigabitEthernetServerAdapters
and Extreme Networks’ 10 Gigabit Ethernet switching
solutions, the reality of achieving 10 Gigabit performance at
the edge of the network is obtainable today.
INTEL
®
ETHERNET 10 GIGABIT SERVER ADAPTERS
Intel has been the leading supplier and innovator of Ethernet
adapters for more than 25 years. Intel’s new 10 Gigabit
Ethernet adapters are designed for multi-core Intel Xeon
processor-based systems, optimized for virtualization, and
include support for unified networking to ensure fast, power-
efficient solutions for a broad range of applications, including
virtualized server environments, blade servers, and copper-
based infrastructures for volume deployment.
Optimized for multi-core processors
Intel
®
Ethernet 10 Gigabit adapters include a number of
latency-lowering features that are optimized for multi-core
Intel Xeon processor-based servers:
• Extended Message-Signaled Interrupts (MSI-X) provide
multiple interrupt vectors, which allow multiple interrupts
to be handled simultaneously and load-balanced across
multiple processor cores, helping to improve CPU
utilization and lower latency. Previous-generation MSI
passed interrupts to a single processor core, leading to
less efficient performance.
• Receive-side Scaling (RSS) improves server load-balancing
by segregating incoming packets into flows and directing
those flows to separate hardware queues in Intel
®
Ethernet
adapters, allowing them to be processed simultaneously.
(On Linux systems, this technology is known as Scalable
I/O.) RSS can also be used to direct multiple TCP/IP
streams to specific processor cores for handling.
Optimized for virtualization
Intel
®
Virtualization Technology for Connectivity (Intel
®
VT-c) enhances server I/O solutions by integrating
extensive hardware assists into the Ethernet controller.
This collection of technologies addresses I/O bottlenecks
by either offloading data-packet processing to the Intel
Ethernet adapter from the hypervisor or providing
direct I/O connectivity to the VMs for faster application
responsiveness and improved processor utilization.
Two technologies comprise Intel VT-c: Virtual Machine Device
Queues (VDMq), which supports virtual switch emulation,
and Virtual Machine Direct Connect (VMDc), which provides
direct assignment between a network connection and a VM.
• VMDq (emulation) improves overall CPU utilization
and throughput levels by offloading the network I/O
management burden from the virtual switch in the
hypervisor to the Ethernet controller. Multiple queues
and sorting intelligence in the silicon support enhanced
network traffic flow in the virtual environment, freeing
processor cycles for application work.
• VMDc (direct assignment) provides near-native I/O
performance by facilitating dedicated I/O and data
isolation among VMs and also enables VM migration.
VMDc uses PCI-SIG SR-IOV and Intel
®
Virtualization
Technology for Directed I/O (Intel
®
VT-d) to support
this functionality.
Figure 2: Multiple queues, RSS, MSI-X working together
in a multi-core system.
LAN
MCH or I/O Hub
PORT 1 PORT 1
Ethernet Controller
CPU
CPU
CPU
CPU