[Jool-list] Run Jool on every host for SIIT-DC?

Tore Anderson tore at fud.no
Thu Sep 29 09:20:56 CDT 2016


* v

> What is the CPU load on the x86 SIIT-BRs from Jool?

Our are practically idle. They are translating about 100Mb/s of mostly
web traffic. The hardware is quite old even, Sun X4170s with 2x
quad-core Intel L5520 CPUs. Less than a quarter of a single CPU core is
used for the entire system (so not only Jool), the remaining 7.75 CPU
cores are idle.

> Can you do 10G with an off-the-shelf server when provided with 2x 10G
> NICs (one for input, one for output)?

I've never done this kind of benchmarking (maybe Alberto has?), but it
wouldn't surprise me at all. If we assume that 100 Mb/s requires 0.25
cores, my eigth-core system would reach full utilisation at 3200 Mb/s
throughput. Modern CPUs have way more cores, and each core is way
faster than mine, so 10 Gb/s seems very achievable to me.

Another thing worth mentioning is that since SIIT is stateless, you can
easily scale horizontally. Just add more servers with identical config,
and have your Juniper do ECMP load-balancing between them.

We do something related - we have a single BR in each of our data
centres, and anycast the same prefixes (i.e., pool4 and pool6) from all
of them. That gives us both optimal routing during normal operation as
well as fault tolerance (if one BR fails, the traffic will just start
flowing through the BR in another data centre).

That said, if you need extreme performance and it turns out Jool is not
up to the task, then you might be able to use VPP
(https://fd.io/technology#one) instead. VPP uses Intel DPDK and is
written with high performance in mind. I've never tried it as an
SIIT-DC BR, but a friend of mine who is working on that project claims
it should work.

Tore


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