TNSR on AMD EPYC ROME

[prx]

Hi,

In the near future I am planning to install 2 TNSR in HA and would like to use 2 Supermicro Servers (1114S-WTRT) with the following features:

• CPU: 1 x AMD EPYC ROME 7302P 16C 3.0/3.3 Ghz
• RAM: 128 GB DDR4-3200 ECC REG DIMM
• HD: 2 x SSD Micron 5300 PRO 240 GB in RAID 1 (ZFS)
• NIC 1: 1 x Mellanox MCX516-CDAT (2 x 100Gb QFSP28 ports)
• NIC 2: 1 x Mellanox MCX516-CDAT (2 x 100Gb QFSP28 ports)
• NIC 3: 1 x Supermicro (Intel) AOC-STG-I4S (4 x 10Gb SFP+ ports)

Now I have some questions:

1. Is the CPU (AMD EPYC ROME) good for TNSR? And what about Intel QAT ?
2. Is Mellanox NIC good for TNSR?
3. Is possible to install TNSR on 2 disks using zfs raid 1 as file system?

I will expect at list a throuput of 40 Gb/s and will use VLANs and QinQ...

Thank you very much

[kiokoman]

TNSR runs on Linux for x86 processors. For best results in data center environments, the following CPUs are recommended:

Intel Xeon Processor E3 Families (v2, v3, v4, v5, v6, and v7)
Intel Xeon Processor E5 Families (v2, v3, v4, v5, v6, and v7)
Intel Xeon Processor E7 Families (v2, v3, v4, v5, v6, and v7)
Intel Xeon Scalable Processors
Intel Xeon D Processors
Intel Atom C2000 & C3000 Processors

this is the recommended CPUs for best results, but it does not mean that the AMD is not good enough

Network Interface Card (NIC) support in TNSR is provided by drivers in the underlying Linux operating system. The following NIC drivers have been tested by Netgate:

mlx4 - for NICs based on the following Mellanox 10/40 Gigabit Ethernet controllers
ConnectX-3 Pro
mlx5 - for NICs based on the following Mellanox 10/25/40/50/100 Gigabit Ethernet controllers
ConnectX-4, ConnectX-4 Lx, ConnectX-5

MCX516-CDAT fall in the mlx5 driver

table feature is available here http://doc.dpdk.org/guides/nics/overview.html
http://doc.dpdk.org/guides/nics/mlx5.html

TNSR, as of now, is based on centos 8 , for zfs raid you need to follow any howto related to centos 8

[stratagem-ben]

Will be very interesting to see what kind of figures you can push with the 7302P. Please update the thread once you've sorted it!

[prx]

@kiokoman

my main question was about Intel QAT which is not present in AMD processors, what can you tell me about that?

Thank you

[kiokoman]

I have no experience in this regard, perhaps the staff can inform us better.
AMD does not have QAT but
netgate sell this addon card
Netgate Intel QuickAssist CPIC-8955 Cryptographic Accelerator Card
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071XMTX7Y

[prx]

Hi,

I read tnsr wiki ( https://docs.netgate.com/tnsr/en/latest/installation/mellanox-mlx5-firmware.html ) and for Mellanox Connect-X 5 we have to downgrade firmaware from

16.26.1040

to

16.26.10

Now from Mellanox site ( https://www.mellanox.com/support/firmware/connectx5en ) is available new firmware version:

16.28.2006

Is this new firmware fully compatible whit tnsr? If not, could you recommend a fully TNSR compliant NIC 40/100 Gb/s?

Thank you

[kiokoman]

@prx said in TNSR on AMD EPYC ROME:

16.26.1040

i think it was specific for that firmware revision but for the network card you mentioned :

tested platform
https://doc.dpdk.org/guides-20.02/rel_notes/release_20_02.html#tested-platforms
Mellanox ConnectX-5 Ex EN 100G MCX516A-CDAT (2x100G)
Host interface: PCI Express 4.0 x16
Device ID: 15b3:1019
Firmware version: 16.27.1000 and above