SMB Direct – The State of RDMA for use with SMB 3 traffic (Part III)
The RDMA wars in regards to SMB Direct: RoCE versus iWarp.
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Tag: smb-direct
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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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SMB Direct – The State of RDMA for use with SMB 3 traffic (Part I)
What is RDMA and why do we like it.
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SMB Direct in a Windows Server 2016 Virtual Machine Experiment
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.
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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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Don’t Fear but Respect Redirected IO with Shared VHDX
When we got Shared VHDX in Windows Server 2012 R2 we were quite pleased as it opened up the road to guest clustering (Failover clustering in virtual machines) without needing to break through the virtualization layer with iSCSI or virtual Fibre Channel (vFC).
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Musings on Windows Server Converged Networking & Storage
Too many people still perceive Windows Server as “just” an operating system (OS). It’s so much more. It’s an OS, a hypervisor, a storage platform with a highly capable networking stack. Both virtualization and cloud computing are driving the convergence of all the above these roles forward fast, with intent and purpose. We’ll position the technologies & designs that convergence requires and look at the implications of these for a better overall understanding of this trend.
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