Home > Workload Solutions > Oracle > Best Practices > Intel-Based Oracle Best Practices on Dell PowerEdge R740 and PowerMax 2000 > Network Best Practices > Day Two Best Practices > Networking: NIC Teaming
NIC teaming enables multiple network interface controllers (NIC) to be placed into a group, which enables fault-tolerance and load-balancing of network traffic. In this best practice, we configured the NICs to use an active/active load-balancing configuration.
Category | Networking |
Product | Broadcom 5720 Quad-port NIC and Mellanox ConnectX-4 NIC |
Type of best practice | Performance Optimization |
Day and value | Day 2, Moderate Recommendation |
Overview
Enterprise applications can have hundreds or thousands of users simultaneously sending or receiving data to the supporting database. All of this information is transmitted across the network, which makes this layer in the stack critical to network availability and performance. In our baseline network configuration, the two NICs were configured in an active-passive design.
When two NICs are grouped in an active-passive team, each network interface controller is connected to a separate network switch. The active NIC manages all network traffic. At the physical network switch, the uplink ports were configured to only allow packets from the public network and the vMotion networks. Any network packets that were not tagged as public or vMotion traffic were dropped.
The passive adapter remains idle until the network switch or the active adapter fails and then it takes the place of the active NIC. This provides network fault-tolerance and enables the enterprise application, including the database, to continue to serve requests. An active-passive NIC team helps with avoiding a single point of failure, but it does not have load-balancing advantages. This was the NIC team configuration used in our database baseline.
In an active/active NIC team configuration, the enterprise adds the benefit of load balancing across the two network adapters. The process involves clicking on the vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS) and under virtual switches, accessing the teaming and failover tab. We selected load balancing from the drop-down box and we also changed both NICs to active adapters.
The goal of the active/active NIC teaming best practice is to provide greater network throughput for the database and for vMotion of the virtualized database to another server.
Recommendation
To test the active/active NIC teaming best practice, the database was running an OLTP workload while the virtual machine was moved by vMotion to another server. The amount of time to vMotion the server as well as New Orders per Minute (NOPM) and Transactions per Minute (TPM) were captured for analysis. Moderate benefit was observed using the active/active NIC teaming best practice for the following metrics:
With active/active NIC teaming, the amount of time for vMotion to complete moving the database under load was less than the active-passive baseline configuration. It is important that vMotion completes its task quickly to prevent any temporary impact to database performance.
In terms of database performance, the active/active NIC teaming configuration also increased performance in the metrics NOPM and TPM.
Implementation Steps
Process to configure NIC teaming for Distributed portgroup for VMware vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS) the vCenter Client:
Additional Resources