SMB Direct – The State of RDMA for use with SMB 3 traffic (Part II)
The Flavors of RDMA & what role DCB plays.
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Tag: dcb
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The dark side of converged storage networks
The fabric of SAN (means Storage Area Network) with Fibre Channel solutions have always been a dedicated network, with dedicated components (like FC switches). But, starting with iSCSI and FCoE protocols, the storage fabric could now be shared with the traditional network infrastructure, because at least level 1 and 2 have a common Ethernet layer (for iSCSI also layer 3 and 4 are the same of TCP/IP networks). Hosts (the initiators) in a converged network use typically Converged Network Adapters (CNAs) that provide both Ethernet and storage functions (usually FCoE and iSCSI).
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The importance of IeeePriorityTag with converged RDMA Switch Embedded Teaming
If you read my blog on Switch Embedded Teaming with RDMA (for SMB Direct) you’ll notice that I set the -IeeePriorityTag to “On” on the vNICs that use DCB for QoS. This requires some explanation. When you configure a Switch Embedded Teaming (SET) vSwitch and define one or more management OS vNICs on which you enable RDMA you will see that the SMB Direct traffic gets it priority tag set correctly. This always happens no matter what you set the -IeeePriorityTag option to. On or Off, it doesn’t make a difference. It works out of the box.
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Why do we always see Responder CQE Errors with RoCE RDMA?
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.
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