Community discussions

MikroTik App
 
LBNL
just joined
Topic Author
Posts: 9
Joined: Thu Oct 18, 2018 1:15 pm

CHR Hypervisor recommenadtion please (Hyper V?)

Mon May 25, 2020 11:29 am

HI all
I'm about to install CHR in a data centre. While I'm big fan of Proxmox, videos, blogs and forum posts suggest there is still a problem with the virtio drivers in KVM / QEMU and the conclusion is that Hyper V is the best hypervisor for CHR.
So, if this is still the case, I wonder if you would be so kind as to recommend which version / release of Hyper V to run please?
Would we require the full Windows server version with GUI (I'd rather keep it as light as possible) or would the core / free version suffice?
I'll be running three instances of of CHR separated into roles for iBGP / VPLS concentrator, PPPoE server / NAT and eBGP (we just take a default from our upstream) and I may run our DNS and RADIUS servers on these boxes also.
Anyone running a similar setup?

Our hardware is:
2 x Dell R430 servers each with:
2 x Xeon E5-2667 v3 8 core CPUs @ 3.20GHz - hyperthreading OFF
64GB RAM
2 x Intel X710 dual port 10Gb NICs

Many thanks
NTB
 
elbob2002
Member Candidate
Member Candidate
Posts: 252
Joined: Tue May 15, 2018 8:15 pm
Location: Ireland

Re: CHR Hypervisor recommenadtion please (Hyper V?)

Mon May 25, 2020 11:41 am

It's a matter of preference. I think Hyper-V is crap and that VMware is the best hypervisor for CHR.

In all seriousness, there are pros and cons of each. If you already have Hyper-V in your environment then use that. If you have a VMware environment - use that.

Keep in mind BGP is single threaded so will only use 1 core.

Also beware of the interface speed limitation of the various CHR license levels.

There's another topic similar to what you asked here:

viewtopic.php?f=15&t=146673
 
LBNL
just joined
Topic Author
Posts: 9
Joined: Thu Oct 18, 2018 1:15 pm

Re: CHR Hypervisor recommenadtion please (Hyper V?)

Mon May 25, 2020 5:51 pm

Thanks for the reply,
I'd rather not use Hyper-V but it seems to provide the best platform for CHR. I've seen the thread you linked to.

Anyone out there running Hyper-V and what version are you using?
Thanks
 
Kindis
Member
Member
Posts: 434
Joined: Tue Nov 01, 2011 6:54 pm
Location: Sweden

Re: CHR Hypervisor recommenadtion please (Hyper V?)

Tue May 26, 2020 9:06 am

I use to run a CHR on Hyper-V and it worked great. Only issue I had was a crash in a specific build but other then that I had no issues.

I however is a user of Hyper-V and like the hypervisor but I think you should run the hypervisor you feel comfortable with and can operate. That will in the end works best.
Different Hypervisors have different weakness and strength. Hyper-V is better then VMware on calculating BPG but VMware has more throughput.
But in the end the hypervisor you know will most lightly work best as you can optimize and troubleshoot best that way.
So I would go with Proxmox as I understand it will work well from threads here on the forum.
 
User avatar
IPAsupport
Frequent Visitor
Frequent Visitor
Posts: 62
Joined: Fri Sep 20, 2019 4:02 pm

Re: CHR Hypervisor recommenadtion please (Hyper V?)

Wed Sep 02, 2020 4:03 am

We did a live presentation in the MUM in Berlin in 2018 and we got the best performance in HyperV using the CHR as an edge router

Check out the video here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcgdGA1 ... e=youtu.be
 
User avatar
ironman820
just joined
Posts: 20
Joined: Tue Feb 09, 2016 5:40 pm
Contact:

Re: CHR Hypervisor recommenadtion please (Hyper V?)

Thu Oct 29, 2020 6:21 pm

I've been watching the video and going over the slides from your MUM presentation and have a few questions for you guys at IPA if you don't mind.

1) Have you done any real world data on a Hyper-V setup to get an idea of what the hypervisor can handle through the actual interfaces? We are testing a Hyper-V installation and were seeing bottle necks around 2-3Gb/s with 10G network cards "directly shared" to the VM.

2) With a Hyper-V setup what settings are you using for networking. Standard or legacy adapters? I'm assuming no SR-IOV? Is TSO enabled by default, and if so how do you turn it off in Hyper-V?

We are loving the way that it sounds Hyper-V will handle the processing to help with BGP convergence, but are concerned that when we fire up our third 10G uplink bandwidth performance will be the bottle neck and not the table convergence.

A brief overview of our setup:
Edge routers (2) are Maxxwave Vengeance routers with ESXi pulling BGP routes 3 hops out from us currently.
Core routers (2) are Maxxwave Vengeance routers one with ESXi and one with Hyper-V (the test router mentioned previously). These only handle routing tables for our network getting default routes from the edge (just under 2,000 BGP/OSPF Routes).
All of these routers are running at least 10G network cards connected to 10G switches to do the actual connections. Set up with 1 SFP+ upstream, 1 SFP+ downstream and vlans to separate traffic for the OSPF connections to our towers.
 
User avatar
ironman820
just joined
Posts: 20
Joined: Tue Feb 09, 2016 5:40 pm
Contact:

Re: CHR Hypervisor recommenadtion please (Hyper V?)

Thu Oct 29, 2020 6:51 pm

Is TSO enabled by default, and if so how do you turn it off in Hyper-V?
I managed to answer my own question on that one. For anyone else intereseted:
Yes, it is enabled by default in the hypervisor. To disable it, run this in a PowerShell on the system:
Disable-NetAdapterChecksumOffload -Name "*"
This command will disable TCP Offload on all network adapters on the machine. You can verify by running:
Get-NetAdapterChecksumOffload
 
coelliale
just joined
Posts: 23
Joined: Fri Jun 09, 2017 7:47 pm

Re: CHR Hypervisor recommenadtion please (Hyper V?)

Tue May 04, 2021 9:37 am

Did you find improvements by disabling checksum offload?

I only read about possible problems ..

thanks
Alessandro
 
User avatar
ironman820
just joined
Posts: 20
Joined: Tue Feb 09, 2016 5:40 pm
Contact:

Re: CHR Hypervisor recommenadtion please (Hyper V?)

Tue May 04, 2021 5:48 pm

IIRC, disabling TSO did afford us a marginal speed boost. The idea as explained to me was that the hypervisor was utilizing this on the physical cards while providing a virtual instance to the router inside. In essence, optimization was being performed twice, both on the physical layer/interface cards, and virtually on the virtual network interfaces. I want to say it was around 2-50 Mb/s worth of throughput gain while doing link saturation tests on 40Gb/s interfaces.

In our testing, even though the router was capable of receiving upwards of 30Gb/s on an interface, no matter the Hypervisor, they wouldn't transmit more than 10Gb/s on a single interface. As such we have stopped deploying CHRs in our network and opted for a different vendor on our edges. We use Mikrotik at every site, but don't rely on CHR anymore for major traffic.
 
miltont
Frequent Visitor
Frequent Visitor
Posts: 59
Joined: Wed Nov 11, 2015 3:58 am

Re: CHR Hypervisor recommenadtion please (Hyper V?)

Fri Aug 06, 2021 2:15 am

Greetings
How do you managed to get the CHR Interface recognize 10GB speed on the HYPERV?
I installed 1 Intel X540 dual 10GB PCIx card and when i bandwidth test it only reaches to almost 500Mbps and 300Mbps from CHR to other Mikrotiks that i have with 10Gb Connectivity
I have attached print screens on this message.
chr-no-rate-interface.jpg
btestchr.jpg
10Gb Adapterjpg.jpg
IIRC, disabling TSO did afford us a marginal speed boost. The idea as explained to me was that the hypervisor was utilizing this on the physical cards while providing a virtual instance to the router inside. In essence, optimization was being performed twice, both on the physical layer/interface cards, and virtually on the virtual network interfaces. I want to say it was around 2-50 Mb/s worth of throughput gain while doing link saturation tests on 40Gb/s interfaces.

In our testing, even though the router was capable of receiving upwards of 30Gb/s on an interface, no matter the Hypervisor, they wouldn't transmit more than 10Gb/s on a single interface. As such we have stopped deploying CHRs in our network and opted for a different vendor on our edges. We use Mikrotik at every site, but don't rely on CHR anymore for major traffic.
You do not have the required permissions to view the files attached to this post.

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 6 guests