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PowerEdge Product Group

Direct from

Development

Accelerate vSAN Deployments with Broadcom NetXtreme

Ethernet Adapters

Tech Note by:

Seamus Jones Dell EMC

Robert Lusinsky Broadcom

SUMMARY

Dell EMC PowerEdge servers

equipped with Broadcom

NetXtreme 10/25Gb Ethernet

solutions provide the building

blocks to simplify deployment

and speed scaling with

unmatched performance.

Within this paper we discuss

the impact 10/25Gb

NetXtreme Ethernet Adapters

can have on a PowerEdge

R740xd vSAN Cluster

Proof of concept performance

testing and results discussed

were achieved utilizing

industry standard HCIBench

on a PowerEdge R740xd

vSAN Cluster at Broadcom

laboratories

Improve vSAN Performance with 10/25Gb Ethernet

When considering performance reliant applications within the datacenter customers

are always considering server and adapter choices that will have the broadest impact

for dollar spend. Often times customers want to verify that the changes made will

impact the application requirements for high speed network performance. As more

applications become optimized for a vSAN distributed layer of software included in

the ESCi hypervisor. The features such as High Availability (HA), vMotion, and

Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) require efficiency within the stack. Since

each host in a vSAN cluster can contribute storage to the cluster it is essential to

evaluate and eliminate any potential throttle points in the architecture which could

reduce application performance.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R740, R640 and R940 servers include Broadcom NetXtreme

10Gb Ethernet adapters in the default server configurations. Enterprise customers

have moved from 1Gb to 10/25Gb at an accelerated pace since 10/25Gb provides

clear benefits to accelerate customers’ use case deployments, which translates to

better value, better service and lower TCO for the customer.

To determine the full impact Broadcom have conducted some testing utilizing Hyper-

converged Infrastructure Benchmark (HCIBench) to determine testing in a consistent

and controlled manner. The results of which will give us an excellent performance

comparison between network speeds. The results here are key indicators for

expected performance gain from a 10/25Gb Ethernet deployment

vSAN Test Node Configuration

• PowerEdge R740xd Node Configuration

• 2 x Intel Xeon Gold 6134

• 8C/16T 3.2GHz

• 12 x 32GB RDIMM 2666MT/s Dual Rank

• HBA330 12Gbps

• Boot: BOSS controller card 2x M.2 240G RAID 1

• Cache Tier: 4 x Dell 800GB NVMe PM1725a

• Capacity Tier: 8 x 1.92TB SSD SAS Read Intensive 12Gbps

Physical Topology

Logical Topology

Summary of content (2 pages)

PAGE 1
Direct from Development PowerEdge Product Group Accelerate vSAN Deployments with Broadcom NetXtreme Ethernet Adapters Improve vSAN Performance with 10/25Gb Ethernet When considering performance reliant applications within the datacenter customers are always considering server and adapter choices that will have the broadest impact for dollar spend. Often times customers want to verify that the changes made will impact the application requirements for high speed network performance.
PAGE 2
According to VMware vSAN host design guidelines best practices indicate that it is absolutely critical to provide more bandwidth for vSAN traffic to improve performance: • If you plan to use hosts that have 1-GbE adapters, dedicate adapters for vSAN only. For all-flash configurations, plan hosts that have dedicated or shared 10-GbE adapters.