System specs for the Packet machines used in the Kubecon Seattle comparison

[taylor]

This provides details on the machines used in the K8s and OpenStack clusters as well as those used for generating traffic.

• [x] Add high-level specs for k8s worker nodes and openstack compute nodes
• [x] Add high-level specs for traffic generator machine
• [x] Add BIOS information for the machines running dataplane NFs
• [x] Add detailed machine specs for worker/compute nodes

[taylor]

Worker/compute machines hosting CNF and VNFs

The Kubernetes and Openstack clusters will have 2-3 machines which run the network functions.

The system hardware configuration is based on the Packet m2.xlarge.x86.

The default dual port Mellanox ConnectX-4 NIC has been replaced by quad port Intel x710 NIC.. The NIC ports are connected to 10GbE ports on the top-of-rack switches.

Specs at a glance:

• CPU: Dual socket Xeon Gold 5120 (2.2Ghz)
• Memory: 384 GB of DDR4 ECC
• Storage: 3.2 TB of NVMe Flash
• NIC: Quad port Intel x710

Master/control machines

TBD

Traffic generator machine

Same as worker node - eg. m2.xlarge.x86 based machine with a quad port Intel x710 NIC

[taylor]

Additional NIC information https://github.com/cncf/cnfs/issues/94

[taylor]

@michaelspedersen, @pmikus, @mackonstan this ticket will contain the specs for the systems being used at Packet for the Kubecon comparison test case.

[ahothan]

Xeon Gold 5120 = 14 cores total of 28 cores (2 sockets) How are you planning to map these cores?

[ahothan]

keep 1/socket for host / kernel that leaves you 2x13 cores to play with, between VPP and NFs

[michaelspedersen]

keep 1/socket for host / kernel that leaves you 2x13 cores to play with, between VPP and NFs

This has also been my go-to approach for configuration so far. We've been trying out a few different configurations (scaling both VPP and VNFs/CNFs)

[ahothan]

in general it would be reasonable to find the "best performing system" given the same amount of resources and preferably in conditions that are realistic and close to production conditions.

[taylor]

BIOS details are in #129