During a recent customer discussion on NSX, I was asked about Virtual Machine sprawl in an NSX environment. This was a great question and cuts to the heart of Network Virtualization and how network functions are implemented in a virtualized environment…
One question that I get asked often is how NSX firewall state is maintained if you have a hypervisor based distributed firewall? The big difference in a distributed firewall vs a perimeter based firewall is that firewall execution has been moved from the perimeter of the network to the vNIC of the Virtual Machine…
Just a heads up to say there are some changes in future vSphere releases to Transparent Page Sharing (TPS) to improve VM to VM security…
Throughput testing over 10 GbE has been an interesting exercise and Virtual Machines using the VMXNET3 adapter achieve impressive throughput while maintaining complete mobility around a VMware Cluster (vMotion/HA/DRS).
The following series of tests validate throughput when using VM’s configured to use SR-IOV…
My testing of Virtual Machine to Virtual Machine throughput demonstrated that with minimal tuning, considerable throughput can be obtained between virtual machines running on the same Hypervisor.
Clearly, the next step was to test throughput between Hypervisors… I had planned on running some initial tests, then based on the results, going “all out” and configuring SR-IOV as needed to obtain as close to wire speed as possible, but initial testing generated some great results…