Hello all, I am hoping that I can gain an understanding based on some things I have been trying to do.
I have a T5120 w/ Solaris 10 10/09 with the latest available firmware updates applied. Before installing and enabling LDoms 1.3, I get respectable transfer rates over the e1000g interfaces (about 2 minutes to transfer a 4GB file) over Gig-E. However, after installing LDoms and creating the services within the control domain, then creating a guest LDom, I attempt to transfer the same 4GB file and now it takes 8 - 10 mins to transfer. I have a pretty typical configuration, at least compared to the Sun/Oracle docs for the software. The OS indicates, through dladm, that the link is up at 1000fdx. The switch on the other end of the link indicates the same. However, upon visual inspection, the e1000g0 link on the rear of the server is orange, when I expect green. Seems to indicate a less than optimal link. In reviewing the release notes for LDoms 1.3, I found a known issue identified as Bug ID 6486234. That seems to indicate that network performance on T2 systems is considerably worse than on systems where LDoms 1.3 is not configured. In fact, this bug seems to be referenced in the release notes for several releases. The release notes go on to explain that a workaround is to "assign a Network Interface Unit (NIU) to the logical domain". Ok. Great...I'll try that. Except the instructions I found to accomplish this task seem to indicate that the on-board e1000g interfaces are not NIU capable interfaces, thus requiring the addition of a PCI network card. I gleaned this information from http://blogs.sun.com/raghuram/entry/niu_hybrid_i_o. which states, specirfically: "NIU has support for 2 ports. Both T5120 and T5220 have two slots for NIU, that is one slot for each port. The XAUI adapters need to be installed in order gain access to the NIU ports." Additionally, if I configure the e1000g interface to support the hybrid mode anyway, it simply does not have an impact on performance. I guess what I am asking is if my assumptions are correct. Is it generally accepted that network performance within a LDom system will be poor? To correct this, is it the case that I would need to install a NIU-capable NIC? -- Take care Rick Miller -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: smime.p7s Type: application/x-pkcs7-signature Size: 5442 bytes Desc: not available URL: <http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/ldoms-discuss/attachments/20100325/c9a1bc84/attachment.bin>
