Among other exciting things, VMworld 2020 also presented project Monterey, which is to be based on a new type of network interface controller (NIC) — SmartNIC. This new NIC rendition will include DPU (data processing unit) capabilities by using different approaches. The idea is to make more server resources available by offloading a set of workloads onto SmartNIC.

Mellanox, an Israeli company, is a leader when it comes to FPGAs and all kinds of programmable logic in the switches and NICs. The latter allow having 25Gbps at a cost and quality level traditional network companies won’t allow. Recently rumors about an acquisition of Mellanox by Microsoft began to circulate. The only decision assessment does not exist, as well as the determination of reasons for which Microsoft decided to take this move. Why does Microsoft want to buy Mellanox?

In the previous article, I’ve described 3 scenarios for testing NVMe-oF performance and skimmed through their hardware and software configuration. Again, what I wanna do, is measure how virtualization influences the NVMe-oF performance (maybe, it doesn’t at all). For this, I’m gonna examine how NVMe-oF performs on a bare metal configuration, and on an infrastructure with Hyper-V and ESXi deployed. In each case, I’ll also evaluate the performance of iSER transport using LIO and SPDK iSCSI. Now that you have the overall understanding of the project, it’s time to move on to configuring our testing environment.

Ever since Windows Server 2012 we have SMB Direct capabilities in the OS and Windows Server 2012 R2 added more use cases such as live migration for example. In Windows Server 2016, even more, workloads leverage SMB Direct, such as S2D and Storage Replication. SMB Direct leverages the RDMA capabilities of a NIC which delivers high throughput at low latency combined with CPU offloading to the NIC. The latter save CPU cycles for the other workloads on the hosts such as virtual machines.

Anyone who has configured and used SMB Direct with RoCE RDMA Mellanox cards appreciates the excellent diagnostic counters Mellanox provides for use with Windows Performance Monitor. They are instrumental when it comes to finding issues and verifying everything is working correctly.

Awesome! Got some new goodies from Mellanox – brand new 40 GbE & InfiniBand gear. We officially love these guys! Stay tuned for new performance tests.