CODEWITHSUNDEEP
network-programminggoogle-compute-enginevirtualizationgoogle-cloud-platformscylla
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Reputation: 4824

Does Google Compute Engine offer SR-IOV (Single Root I/O Virtualization)?

Amazon / AWS EC2 offers SR-IOV (Single Root I/O Virtualization) instances, which it dubs "enhanced networking" -- does Google offer this on Compute Engine?

Specifically, are any GCE instance types able to bypass the hypervisor and have direct access to a multi-queue NIC?

SRV-IOV support is needed to take advantage of Scylla DB's architecture?

HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10262719

Upvotes: 3

Views: 4010

Answers (2)

Jon Olson
Jon Olson

Reputation: 81

Currently Google Compute Engine does not offer SR-IOV. That said, SR-IOV is not strictly necessary to take advantage of Scylla's architecture.

GCE offers multi-queue networking and it is possible to directly user-mode assign the virtio-net queues using Intel's DPDK. This should allow our virtio-net NIC to work with Scylla, although at least at one point DPDK made certain qemu specific assumptions with respect to virtio-net (in particular it assumed Tx/Rx queue depths of 256 descriptors; the virtio-net NIC in GCE currently advertises 16,384 entry queues although this is likely to change in the near future).

For applications like Scylla this should offer superior network performance and better in-guest compute overhead over utilizing the kernel TCP/IP stack.

Additionally, for all GCE instances with >= 1 cores (i.e., not fractional core instances) we offer multi-Gbps throughput subject to fabric availability. Latency is likely to be lowest in zones with Haswell processors. We do not currently guarantee specific network characteristics, but we offer up to 2 Gbps/core of network throughput shared between the virtual NIC and any attached persistent disk volumes (Local SSD throughput does not count against this limit). Throughput wise this makes 8-vCPU and larger instances comparable to EC2 Enhanced Networking.

Upvotes: 6

Patrice
Patrice

Reputation: 4692

At the moment, nothing that we offer is similar to AWS' "enhanced networking".

You are more than welcome posting this as a Feature Request on our Compute Engine Issue tracker though, so we can look at implementing a similar feature.

Upvotes: 3

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