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VMDq and VMware Netqueue will fill your virtual 10GbE NICs with high-speed, low-latency goodness

posted by John Troyer (VMWare) on August 22, 2008

To start us off, Intel’s Shefali Chinni explains what’s going on with VMDq and Netqueue.

To recap, here are some things you should know about Virtual Machine Device Queues (VMDq) from Intel and Netqueue from VMware:

  • VMDq is the base technology, Netqueue is the software feature baked into VMware ESX.
  • You need this if you want to take advantage of 10 Gigabit Ethernet in your virtual machines. Without it, you max out at about 3-4 Gb. With Netqueue, Shefali was showing ESX with throughput of 9.3-9.4 Gb.
  • It offloads the work that ESX has to do to route packets to virtual machines, so using Netqueue frees up CPU and reduces latency.
  • This is a technology that runs down on the Ethernet controller hardware and exists today, so you don’t need to wait for Nehalem.
  • Netqueue is supported on VMware ESX 3.5 Updates 1 and 2.

At IDF, Turtle Entertainment, parent of the Electronic Sports League, was demonstrating VMDq/Netqueue by showing no impact on latency as people played Counter-Strike on VMware Virtual Infrastructure. On this 4-way Dunnington system were 4 x 6 cores = 24 total cores running 36 VMs, totalling 108 game processes with 1290 robots playing and 6 real players. CPU usage was around 75%. They ran this virtualized game with a team of professional video game players in Germany, who experienced no any additional latency while running around and shooting each other. This would not have been possible without VMDq and Netqueue.

Here’s a clip of the game at IDF in action.

Bjoern Metzdorf, Director of Information Technology at Turtle Entertainment, talking with Alan Bumgarner of Intel about the overall benefits of moving their gaming platform onto virtual infrastructure.

The benefits of this 18:1 consolidation include an 85-90% reduction in power usage, resulting in $348,000 in savings even without taking into effect reduced cooling costs. What I found especially interestng when I was talking with Bjoern was that because of the memory page sharing technologies in ESX, instead of the specified 36GB of RAM usage by the 36 virtual machines, they were seeing only about 20GB used — and again, all without a perceptible hit on performance.

For more information, VMware and Intel have produced a short white paper on VMDq and Netqueue: Intelligent Queueing Technologies for Virtualization

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