SRIOV Performance Testing

Posted by on 02 Jan 2017 in AIX Tuning, VIO Server Tips, AIX Tips, SRIOV and vNIC, Performance Testing

Here are the results of my SRIOV performance testing. These tests were conducted on a 9119 MHE (E880). No other workloads were running at the time of the testing so these results should provide a very good indication of achievable throughput when using SRIOV ports. We have the EN0J PCIe3 4-Port 10Gb FCoE & 1GbE Cards. Each test was run eight times to get a good average set of results.

For reference, here are the LPAR and VIO Server Configurations.

OS Level	7.2.0.1	7.2.0.1	2.2.4.21	2.2.4.21
System	9119-MHE	9119-MHE	9119-MHE	9119-MHE
Processor Frequency	4024	4024	4024	4024
Entitled Capacity	2.00	2.00	2.00	2.00
Virtual CPU	2	2	2	2
Mode	uncapped	uncapped	dedicated donating	dedicated donating
Memory	16384	16384	12288	12288

SRIOV network adapter settings.

These are the settings and adapter type. PCIe2 10GbE SFP+ SR 4-port Converged Network Adapter.

jumbo_frames yes
jumbo_size 9014
large_receive yes
large_send yes
media_speed 10000_Full_Duplex

The default settings for network adapter buffers in AIX 7.2 are the same but the buf_mode attribute default has changed to min_max. This increases the default number of min_buf_* to be the same as the max_buf_* attribute. See my blog post for details.

entstat -d ent0

Receive Information
Receive Buffers
Buffer Type Tiny Small Medium Large Huge
Min Buffers 2048 2048 256 64 64
Max Buffers 2048 2048 256 64 64
Allocated 2048 2048 256 64 64
Registered 2048 2048 256 64 64
History
Max Allocated 2048 2048 256 64 64
Lowest Registered 2047 1996 128 32 56