VMworld #SPO3040 – Best Practises Using 10GbE (for vSphere 5.0)

By On 29 Aug 2011 · 2 Comments

I attended Intel’s #SPO3040 earlier this afternoon – Best Practises for Deploying VMware vSphere 5.0 Using 10GbE.  It was an interesting session with lots of good material.  Here are 3 short little titbits that I tweeted about that I thought might useful to record here:

  • Intel said we will start to see 10GBASE-T on server boards very soon. This allows WoL (Wake-on-LAN) and OOB (Out-of_Band) type services, unlike SFP+ DA or SPF+ Fiber (although as @AlexanderJN pointed out, 10GBASE-T is still much more expensive on the switch port side, and consumes more power).
  • To check the speed and width of a server’s PCI Express slots, try this:
grep Express /var/log/vmkernel.log |more
You need at least a 5.0Gb/s (Gen 2) x 8 slot to get the full line rate of a 10GbE card.
  • With the newer Load Balanced Teaming Policy that came with vSphere 4.1, the traffic needs to hit 75% bandwidth utilization for 30 seconds on a pNIC for the load to be migrated.
 

2 Responses to VMworld #SPO3040 – Best Practises Using 10GbE (for vSphere 5.0)

  1. Brian Johnson says:
    31 Aug 2011 at 10:12 am

    Thanks for attending and the blog.
    @Thehevy

    Reply
  2. Technology Short Take #14 - blog.scottlowe.org - The weblog of an IT pro specializing in virtualization, storage, and servers says:
    12 Sep 2011 at 6:02 am

    [...] lead author with whom I worked on VMware vSphere Design, published earlier this year—posted some great 10Gb Ethernet-related information from VMworld session [...]

    Reply