Chapter 2. Hardware requirements

For a list of tested NICs for NFV, see the Red Hat Knowledgebase solution Network Adapter Fast Datapath Feature Support Matrix.

If you configure OVS-DPDK on Mellanox ConnectX-4 or ConnectX-5 network interfaces, you must set the corresponding kernel driver in the compute-ovs-dpdk.yaml file:

members
 - type: ovs_dpdk_port
    name: dpdk0
    driver: mlx5_core
    members:
    - type: interface
      name: enp3s0f0

When you plan your deployment, you must understand the NUMA topology of your Compute node to partition the CPU and memory resources for optimum performance. To determine the NUMA information, perform one of the following tasks:

For example, the numa_topology collector is part of the hardware-inspection extras and includes the following information for each NUMA node:

To retrieve the information listed above, substitute <UUID> with the UUID of the bare-metal node to complete the following command:

# openstack baremetal introspection data save <UUID> | jq .numa_topology

The following example shows the retrieved NUMA information for a bare-metal node:

{
  "cpus": [
    {
      "cpu": 1,
      "thread_siblings": [
        1,
        17
      ],
      "numa_node": 0
    },
    {
      "cpu": 2,
      "thread_siblings": [
        10,
        26
      ],
      "numa_node": 1
    },
    {
      "cpu": 0,
      "thread_siblings": [
        0,
        16
      ],
      "numa_node": 0
    },
    {
      "cpu": 5,
      "thread_siblings": [
        13,
        29
      ],
      "numa_node": 1
    },
    {
      "cpu": 7,
      "thread_siblings": [
        15,
        31
      ],
      "numa_node": 1
    },
    {
      "cpu": 7,
      "thread_siblings": [
        7,
        23
      ],
      "numa_node": 0
    },
    {
      "cpu": 1,
      "thread_siblings": [
        9,
        25
      ],
      "numa_node": 1
    },
    {
      "cpu": 6,
      "thread_siblings": [
        6,
        22
      ],
      "numa_node": 0
    },
    {
      "cpu": 3,
      "thread_siblings": [
        11,
        27
      ],
      "numa_node": 1
    },
    {
      "cpu": 5,
      "thread_siblings": [
        5,
        21
      ],
      "numa_node": 0
    },
    {
      "cpu": 4,
      "thread_siblings": [
        12,
        28
      ],
      "numa_node": 1
    },
    {
      "cpu": 4,
      "thread_siblings": [
        4,
        20
      ],
      "numa_node": 0
    },
    {
      "cpu": 0,
      "thread_siblings": [
        8,
        24
      ],
      "numa_node": 1
    },
    {
      "cpu": 6,
      "thread_siblings": [
        14,
        30
      ],
      "numa_node": 1
    },
    {
      "cpu": 3,
      "thread_siblings": [
        3,
        19
      ],
      "numa_node": 0
    },
    {
      "cpu": 2,
      "thread_siblings": [
        2,
        18
      ],
      "numa_node": 0
    }
  ],
  "ram": [
    {
      "size_kb": 66980172,
      "numa_node": 0
    },
    {
      "size_kb": 67108864,
      "numa_node": 1
    }
  ],
  "nics": [
    {
      "name": "ens3f1",
      "numa_node": 1
    },
    {
      "name": "ens3f0",
      "numa_node": 1
    },
    {
      "name": "ens2f0",
      "numa_node": 0
    },
    {
      "name": "ens2f1",
      "numa_node": 0
    },
    {
      "name": "ens1f1",
      "numa_node": 0
    },
    {
      "name": "ens1f0",
      "numa_node": 0
    },
    {
      "name": "eno4",
      "numa_node": 0
    },
    {
      "name": "eno1",
      "numa_node": 0
    },
    {
      "name": "eno3",
      "numa_node": 0
    },
    {
      "name": "eno2",
      "numa_node": 0
    }
  ]
}

The following table describes the required BIOS settings for NFV:

On processors that use the intel_idle driver, Red Hat Enterprise Linux can ignore BIOS settings and re-enable the processor C-state.

You can disable intel_idle and instead use the acpi_idle driver by specifying the key-value pair intel_idle.max_cstate=0 on the kernel boot command line.

Confirm that the processor is using the acpi_idle driver by checking the contents of current_driver:

# cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpuidle/current_driver
acpi_idle