vNIC Performance Testing with No VIOS SEA Adapter

Posted by on 20 Sep 2016 in AIX Tuning, SRIOV and vNIC, Performance Testing

Here are the results of my vNIC 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 vNIC.

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 these tests, the VIO Servers did not have a SEA adapter configured, so these tests show the VIO Server CPU load from just the vnicserver_crq threads. I conducted exactly the same tests with the VIO Server having SEA adapters to show the extra VIO Server CPU utilisation for bridging the SEA traffic.

For reference, here are my 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