Greater Manageability and Throughput: Cisco Nexus* 1000V Series Switches and Intel's Virtual Machine Device Queues

Working Together
Tight integration with VMware ESX allows the Cisco Nexus
1000V Switch and Intel’s VMDq to work together seamlessly
to deliver near-native throughput and VM-aware networking.
When incoming data packets arrive at the Intel Ethernet port,
VMDq groups them into queues. NetQueue, VMware’s network
multiqueue technology, then forwards the queued packets
to the Cisco Nexus 1000V Switch. Upon receipt of the data
packets, the Cisco Nexus 1000V Switch identifies the desti-
nation address, and deploys the policies associated with the
destination VM, before forwarding the packets to the VMs.
Performance
Testing performed by Intel has shown that an Intel
®
Ethernet
10 Gigabit Server Adapter with VMDq enabled achieves near-
native throughput in a VMware ESX-based server with both
the ESX vSwitch and the Cisco Nexus 1000V Switch.
2
Summary
Today’s more powerful servers provide opportunities for greater
consolidation through virtualization in IT data centers; however,
the impact to server network management and I/O throughput
cannot be forgotten. The Cisco Nexus 1000V Series Switches
and VMDq from Intel address these issues to help increase
data center efficiency and scalability.
With the Cisco Nexus 1000V Series, virtual machines are
treated in the same way as physical servers in security policy,
monitoring and troubleshooting. Nexus 1000V extends the
existing operational model between network and server admin-
istrators and enables virtual machines to be true basic building
blocks of the data center. These operational efficiencies lead to
greater scaling of server virtualization deployments with lower
operation expenditures.
VMDq’s ability to offload the data packet sorting overhead from
the vSwitch to hardware in the Intel Ethernet controller, frees
more CPU cycles and improves throughput, allowing for greater
application processing and increased VM scalability.
Figure 3. Cisco
®
Nexus
™
1000V Series Switch and VMDq in a VMware
ESX* environment
Figure 4. VMDq performance with VMware ESX* vSwitch and
Cisco
®
Nexus
™
1000V Switch
1
Intel
®
Virtualization Technology requires a computer system with an enabled Intel
®
processor, BIOS, virtual machine monitor (VMM) and, for some uses, certain platform software enabled for it.
Functionality, performance or other benefits will vary depending on hardware and software configurations and may require a BIOS update. Software applications may not be compatible with all
operating systems. Please check with your application vendor.
2
Performance claim supported by performance result of a benchmark using NTttcp. Intel internal measurement (June 2009). Production system with two Intel
®
Xeon
®
processors 5500 series 2.93 GHz,
two 10GbE adapters based on the Intel
®
82598 10 Gigabit Ethernet Controller, VMware ESX 4.0. Systems were connected using a Cisco Catalyst* 6503 switch with a 16-port 10GBase-T module.
Copyright © 2009 Intel Corporation. All rights reserved. Intel and the Intel logo are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and other countries.
Copyright © 2009 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. Cisco, the Cisco logo, and Nexus are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cisco Systems, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and
certain other countries.
*Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.
Printed in USA 0609/BY/OCG/XX/PDF
Please Recycle 322292-001US
Cisco Nexus 1000V series
VEM applies policies to
sorted data
Cisco Nexus
1000V VEM
VM VM VM VM
Queue 1 Queue 2 Queue 3 Queue 1
VMware NetQueue
VMware NetQueue provides
the sorted information to
the Cisco Nexus 1000V
series VEM
VMDq sorts incoming data
into queues based on
destination VM
LAN
Packet Classifier Unit
For More Information
For more information about Cisco Nexus 1000V Series
Switches, visit www.cisco.com/go/1000v
For more information about Intel Ethernet products,
visit www.intel.com/go/Ethernet
For more information about Intel Virtualization Technology
for Connectivity, visit www.intel.com/go/vtc
Throughput (Gbps)
VMware ESX vSwitch
with VMDq
VMware ESX and
Cisco Nexus 1000V
with VMDq
10
8
6
4
9.4 9.4
2