White Paper

NetXtreme®
Supermicro vSAN-Ready Node with Broadcom
NetXtreme 25G Ethernet Adapter for MissionCritical HCI Workload

As customers aim to improve the performance of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), they must evaluate all thepotential bottlenecks that can throttle performance. Eachnode in a vSAN environment has the ability to provide
scaling-out storage for an entire cluster. Improving thenetwork bandwidth and efficiency of the HCI environment
enables high availability (HA), vMotion, and distributed
resource scheduler (DRS) within the stack—preventing any
potential bottlenecks in the vSAN cluster.
Broadcom collaborated with Super Micro Computer, Inc. tovalidate improvements in storage IOPs and throughput. ASupermicro vSAN ReadyNode™ configuration wasimplemented and these nodes were equipped withBroadcom NetXtreme adapters. VMWare HCIBench wasused as the basis for measuring the results, which shows aclear advantage in moving from 1G to 10G/25G link speeds.
This advantage is shown in Figure 1.

Most enterprise customers have transitioned from 1G to10G bandwidth and taken advantage of the higher
throughput (13x) and IOPS (13x) this move provides.
Broadcom NetXtreme adapters provide an additional 90%
improvement in performance (IOPS and throughput) whenupgrading from 10G to 25G bandwidth. At larger block
sizes, there is a visible advantage to having 25GbE
bandwidth. This eliminates any potential bottlenecks invSAN traffic, thus creating better value and a lower cost ofownership (COO) for customers. Figure 3 shows this 90%
improvement in throughput.
Figure 2: Supermicro vSAN-Ready Node

Figure 3: HCI Bench 70% Read Random—25G vs. 10G

Figure 1: HCI Bench 70% Read Random—10G vs. 1G
300

6000

200

4000

300

10000

2000

6000

4000
100

13x (IO/s)
2000

90% (IO/s)
0Throughput (MB/s)

100

200
IO/s (K)

13x (Throughput)

Throughput (MB/s)

IO/s (K)8000

90% (Throughput)

04 KB

16 KB

64 KB
Block Size

256 KB

1024 KBIOPS (10G)IOPS (1G)
Throughput (10G)
Throughput (1G)004 KB

16 KB

64 KB
Block Size

256 KB

1024 KBIOPS (25G)
IOPS (10G)
Throughput (25G)
Throughput (10G)

Broadcom

VSAN-WP100
August 23, 2019

Supermicro vSAN-Ready Node with Broadcom NetXtreme 25G Ethernet Adapter for Mission-Critical HCI Workload

NetXtreme White Paper

Figure 4: vSAN Configuration
VM

VM

VM

VM

VM

VM

VM

VM

VM

VM

VM

VM

VM

VM

VM

VMvSphere

Virtual SANvSAN Node 1vSAN Node 2vSAN Node 3vSAN Node 4

NVMe

NVMe

NVMe

NVMe

NVMe

NVMe

NVMe

NVMe

NVMe

NVMe

NVMe

NVMe

NVMe

NVMe

NVMe

NVMe

S
S
D

S
S
DS
S
DS
S
DS
S
DS
S
DS
S
DS
S
DS
S
DS
S
DS
S
DS
S
DS
S
DSSDSS
DS
S
DS
S
DSS
DS
S
DS
S
DS
S
DSS
DSS
DSS
DS
S
DSS
DSS
DS
S
DSS
DSS
DSS
DSS
DvSAN
Datastore

Figure 5: Physical Setup
Mgmt Network
10.13.224.0/20

Table 1: System Details

Mgmt Switch
Test
Management
ConsolevCenter/HCI Bench/Lanchpad

Test Switch
Test Network
172.16.0.0/16

Node 1

Node 2

Node 3

Node 4Broadcom

No. of vSAN Nodes

4

SMCI vSAN Ready Node

2029U-E1CRT

CPU

2x 6134RAM

12x 32 GB RAM

Controller

SMC3008 Storage Controller

OS Drive2x 240G M.2

Cache SSD

Intel SD3-S4610 960G x4

Capacity Drives

8x1.92 TB SAS drive, 2.5 in. SAS

Network Interface Card

AOC-S25G-B2S-Broadcom

The Supermicro vSAN-Ready Node coupled with Broadcom
NetXtreme 10GbE/25GbE solutions provide the building
blocks to simplify deployment and speed-scaling for vSANclusters. To increase the performance of throughput andbandwidth, customers simply need to move their networks
from 1 Gb to 10 Gb, thus increasing throughput and storage
IOPS. The move to 10-Gigabit/25-Gigabit Ethernet speedstranslates to increased application performance along with
better utilization and scaling of compute power and storage
performance. This paper shows that vSAN deployments
significantly benefit from upgrading 1GbE to 10GbE/25GbE
speeds.

VSAN-WP100
2

Broadcom, the pulse logo, Connecting everything, NetXtreme, Avago Technologies, Avago, and the A logo are among thetrademarks of Broadcom and/or its affiliates in the United States, certain other countries, and/or the EU.
Copyright © 2019 Broadcom. All Rights Reserved.
The term “Broadcom” refers to Broadcom Inc. and/or its subsidiaries. For more information, please visit www.broadcom.com.
Broadcom reserves the right to make changes without further notice to any products or data herein to improve reliability,function, or design. Information furnished by Broadcom is believed to be accurate and reliable. However, Broadcom does
not assume any liability arising out of the application or use of this information, nor the application or use of any product or
circuit described herein, neither does it convey any license under its patent rights nor the rights of others.
Supermicro, the Supermicro logo, and Supermicro vSAN ReadyNode are among the trademarks of Super Micro Computer,Inc. or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries.