10GE Testing – Multi-NIC vMotion
Had access to some 10GE NICs and therefore decided to do some performance testing and try out Multi-NIC vMotion.
Intel X520-DA2
The 10GE NICs were Intel X520-DA2 and I used SFP-H10GB-CU3M to connect directly to both hosts as I do not access to a 10GE switch at the moment.
Without reading any documentation, I tried add both 10GE ports into a vSwitch and vMotion does not work. After googling and reading the documentation, we actually have to separate the 10GE ports into their own vSwitches before the Multi-NIC vMotion will work.
**Single-NIC 10GE vMotion Configuration
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**Single-NIC 10GE vMotion Tests
** Test 1: 14 seconds
Test 2: 14 seconds
Test 3: 10 seconds
Test 4: 11 seconds
**Single-NIC 10GE vMotion Network Performance Graphs
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**Multi-NIC 2X10GE vMotion Configuration
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**Multi-NIC 2X10GE vMotion Tests
Test 1: 10 seconds
Test 2: 12 seconds
Test 3: 09 seconds
Test 4: 12 seconds
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**Multi-NIC 2X10GE vMotion Network Performance Graphs
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Conclusion:
Although with Multi-NIC, vMotion seems to perform faster as compare to Single-NIC, however, the difference is not significant. This is probably due to the size and the number of VMs I used for the vMotion tests.
It was noticed that there was load sharing of vMotion traffic between the 2 10GE ports as you can see from the network performance graphs. Using single-NIC, network usage is about 200MBps while multi-NIC scenario, network usage is about 100MBps per NIC which is 50% of that single-NIC.
