Chapter 2. Hardware requirements

This section describes the hardware details necessary for NFV.

You can use Red Hat Technologies Ecosystem to check for a list of certified hardware, software, cloud provider, component by choosing the category and then selecting the product version.

For a complete list of the certified hardware for Red Hat OpenStack Platform, see Red Hat OpenStack Platform certified hardware.

2.1. Tested NICs

The following hardware have been tested to work with the Red Hat OpenStack Platform 12 NFV deployment:

SR-IOV

Red Hat tested the SR-IOV 10G for Mellanox and Qlogic. Red Hat also tested the following Intel cards:

  • 82598, 82599, X520, X540, X550, X710, XL710, X722, XXV710.
Note

Red Hat has verified original Intel NICs only and not any other NICs that use the same drivers.

OVS-DPDK

Red Hat tested the following NICs for OVS-DPDK:

Intel
82598, 82599, X520, X540, X550, X710, XL710, X722, XXV710.
Note

Red Hat has verified original Intel NICs only and not any other NICs that use the same drivers.

2.2. Discovering your NUMA node topology

When you plan your deployment, you need to understand the NUMA topology of your Compute node to partition the CPU and memory resources for optimum performance. To determine the NUMA information, you can:

  • Enable hardware introspection to retrieve this information from bare-metal nodes.
  • Log onto each bare-metal node to manually collect the information.
Note

You must install and configure the undercloud before you can retrieve NUMA information through hardware introspection. See the Director Installation and Usage Guide for details.

Retrieving Hardware Introspection Details

The Bare Metal service hardware inspection extras (inspection_extras) is enabled by default to retrieve hardware details. You can use these hardware details to configure your overcloud. See Configuring the Director for details on the inspection_extras parameter in the undercloud.conf file.

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

  • RAM (in kilobytes)
  • Physical CPU cores and their sibling threads
  • NICs associated with the NUMA node

Use the openstack baremetal introspection data save _UUID_ | jq .numa_topology command to retrieve this information, with the UUID of the bare-metal node.

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
    }
  ]
}

2.3. Review BIOS Settings

The following listing describes the required BIOS settings for NFV:

  • C3 Power State - Disabled.
  • C6 Power State - Disabled.
  • MLC Streamer - Enabled.
  • MLC Spacial Prefetcher - Enabled.
  • DCU Data Prefetcher - Enabled.
  • DCA - Enabled.
  • CPU Power and Performance - Performance.
  • Memory RAS and Performance Config → NUMA Optimized - Enabled.
  • Turbo Boost - Disabled.