Dell Networking Solution Resources User Manual

Network Partition (NPAR) Technology and
VMware Virtual Switch comparison using
QLogic BCM57800

Dell Network Solutions Engineering
February 2016

This application note discusses the pros and cons of the QLogic BCM57800 series
network partition (NPAR) technology and VMware’s virtual standard switch (VSS) as
well as virtual distributed switch (VDS) with traffic shaping.

Date

Version

Description

Authors

February 2016

1.0

Initial Release

Neal Beard

Revisions

Copyright © 2016 Dell Inc. or its subsidiaries. All Rights Reserved.
Except as stated below, no part of this document may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any
means, without express permission of Dell.

You may distribute this document within your company or organization only, without alteration of its contents.
THIS DOCUMENT IS PROVIDED “AS-IS”, AND WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED. IMPLIED

WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE SPECIFICALLY
DISCLAIMED. PRODUCT WARRANTIES APPLICABLE TO THE DELL PRODUCTS DESCRIBED IN THIS DOCUMENT
MAY BE FOUND AT: http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/vn/terms-of-sale-commercial-and-public-sector-warranties

Performance of network reference architectures discussed in this document may vary with differing deployment conditions,
network loads, and the like. Third party products may be included in reference architectures for the convenience of the
reader. Inclusion of such third party products does not necessarily constitute Dell’s recommendation of those products.
Please consult your Dell representative for additional information.

Trademarks used in this text: Dell™, the Dell logo, Dell Boomi™, PowerEdge™, PowerVault™, PowerConnect™,
OpenManage™, EqualLogic™, Compellent™, KACE™, FlexAddress™, Force10™ and Vostro™ are trademarks of Dell

Inc. EMC VNX®, and EMC Unisphere® are registered trademarks of Dell. Other Dell trademarks may be used in this
document. Cisco Nexus®, Cisco MDS®, Cisco NX-0S®, and other Cisco Catalyst® are registered trademarks of Cisco
System Inc. Intel®, Pentium®, Xeon®, Core® and Celeron® are registered trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and

other countries. AMD® is a registered trademark and AMD Opteron™, AMD Phenom™ and AMD Sempron™ are

trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. Microsoft®, Windows®, Windows Server®, Internet Explorer®, MS-DOS®,
Windows Vista® and Active Directory® are either trademarks or registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the
United States and/or other countries. Red Hat® and Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® are registered trademarks of Red Hat,
Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. Novell® and SUSE® are registered trademarks of Novell Inc. in the United
States and other countries. Oracle® is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. VMware®, Virtual
SMP®, vMotion®, vCenter® and vSphere® are registered trademarks or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States
or other countries. IBM® is a registered trademark of International Business Machines Corporation. Broadcom® and
NetXtreme® are registered trademarks of QLogic is a registered trademark of QLogic Corporation. Other trademarks and
trade names may be used in this document to refer to either the entities claiming the marks and/or names or their products
and are the property of their respective owners. Dell disclaims proprietary interest in the marks and names of others.

2 Network Partition (NPAR) Technology and VMware Virtual Switch comparison using QLogic BCM57800 | version 1.0

Table of contents

Revisions............................................................................................................................................................................. 2

1 Overview ....................................................................................................................................................................... 4

2 QLogic BCM57800 Series NPAR with VMware’s VSS ................................................................................................ 5

3 VMware’s VSS with traffic shaping............................................................................................................................... 8

4 VMware VDS with traffic shaping ............................................................................................................................... 11

5 A VMware VDS with VM network resource pools ...................................................................................................... 14

6 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................................................. 16

A Component Revisions ................................................................................................................................................ 17

B Additional Information ................................................................................................................................................. 18

3 Network Partition (NPAR) Technology and VMware Virtual Switch comparison using QLogic BCM57800 | version 1.0

1 Overview

When designing networks, one very important consideration is how much bandwidth to allocate to the
different devices that need varying levels of throughput. Where this bandwidth management occurs is
generally based on:

 Where bottlenecks occur
 What traffic types need prioritization (for example, Multicast, e-commerce applications, VoIP)
 General business needs

Techniques for bandwidth management include:

 Data compression to reduce the size of the data being transmitted
 Caching to store frequently used data locally instead of transmitting it multiple times
 Traffic shaping/bandwidth prioritization to optimize or guarantee performance, improve latency and/or

increase usable bandwidth for some kinds of packets by delaying other kinds

Numerous bandwidth management techniques can alleviate multiple throughput issues on a network. This
application note focuses on traffic shaping to achieve optimal throughput through prioritization using the tools
provided by the QLogic BCM57800 series Converged Network Adapter (CNA), VMware and VMware’s two
virtual switch types: the vSphere Standard Switch (VSS) and the vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS).

This document provides four configuration examples utilizing:

 QLogic NPAR with a VMware VSS
 VMware VSS with traffic shaping and NPAR
 VMware VDS with traffic shaping and NPAR
 VMware VDS with VM network resource pools and NPAR

Note: The QLogic BCM57800 series network adapter’s bandwidth allocation fields take precedence over
any VSS or VDS traffic shaping settings.

4 Network Partition (NPAR) Technology and VMware Virtual Switch comparison using QLogic BCM57800 | version 1.0

2 QLogic BCM57800 Series NPAR with VMware’s VSS

QLogic’s NPAR technology helps simplify a data center’s network and storage infrastructure in two distinct
ways:

 When using chassis-based blade servers that are limited to two or three PCIe slots, NPAR can

increase the uplink ports in VMware by a factor of eight

o Rack-based servers, which typically ship with up to eight PCIe slots, can supply enough

physical dual- or quad-port network adapters for uplink ports. Since VMware 6.0’s maximum
limitation per ESXi host of uplink ports is sixteen 10GbE ports and four 1GbE ports, NPAR is
not needed

 When implementing bandwidth management, QLogic’s BCM57800 series network adapters have an

easy-to-use, transmit-based global bandwidth allocation configuration menu

QLogic’s NPAR technology also offers the following benefits:

 Support for up to eight partitions per CNA and up to four partitions per CNA port
 Support for monolithic operating systems and hypervisors—Microsoft Windows, Linux, and VMware

operating systems (OS)

 No OS or BIOS changes required
 Pre-OS operations for boot from SAN or PXE
 Agnostic switch support for industry-standard 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GbE) switches
 NIC control of the transmit flow rate from the server
 Flexible and dynamic bandwidth allocation
 Comprehensive support for standard network offload technologies including:

• Large send offload

• TCP/IP and TCP/UDP

• TCP checksum offload

• Receive-side scaling

• Transparent Packet Aggregation (TPA)

 Support for the TCP/IP Offload Engine (TOE) and Internet SCSI (iSCSI) host bus adapters (HBAs).
 Support for Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)

5 Network Partition (NPAR) Technology and VMware Virtual Switch comparison using QLogic BCM57800 | version 1.0

The QLogic BCM57840 network adapter provisioning in Figure 1 provides for no minimum traffic shaping
restrictions and full availability of the transmitted (TX) bandwidth. Administrators can tune these minimum and
maximum bandwidth allocation percentages after they know the I/O profile of the application using these NIC
partitions.

QLogic BCM57840 bandwidth allocation menu

6 Network Partition (NPAR) Technology and VMware Virtual Switch comparison using QLogic BCM57800 | version 1.0