Testing Vyatta Subscription Edition 6.5 R1

We here at SDN Testing have been working with Router Analysis, Inc. our parent company doing testing of Vyatta Subscription Edition 6.5 R1 under VMWare.  Testing of Vyatta on hardware is located on Router Analysis.

For the VMWare setup we ran VMWare Hypervisor v5.1 on our spec setup as built by IXSystems:

SuperMicro X9SAE-V
Intel I7-3770 / 32G ECC RAM
Four Intel I340-T2 NICS (8 Ports Total)
Intel 520 Series 240GB SSD

We setup one of the Intel I340-T2 NICs using VMDirectPassThrough and utilized it for the upstream ports to the network.  The other 3 NICs were setup using VMWares default vSwitch configuration, each port was in it’s own vSwitch.  Those six ports were connected to another system generating packets while two VMs were created on the local machine to finish the total of eight.

Vyatta was given a VM with 2vCPUs and 4GB of RAM.

The following diagram shows the setup.

From previous tests, which will be included in the full report, we knew that each vSwitch port can forward 23% Line-Rate IMIX traffic (Tri-Modal: 7 x 64 bytes, 4 x 512 bytes, 1 x 1518) when 8 ports are in use.

Therefore each tenant was configured to send 234 Mbps of traffic outbound through the two uplink ports for a total of 1.9 Gbps.

The next steps were to configure features:

uRPF, ACLs and QoS (Shaping and Policing)

There was no impact from the features as the traffic limitation appeared to have nothing to do with Vyatta and more to do with the VMWare setup.  We were able to send IMIX traffic without issue out the two uplink interfaces at 1.9 Gbps total.

From our testing, we have concluded that Vyatta Subscription Edition 6.5 R1 behaves as expected when used as a multi-tenant virtual router.  Easily supporting the traffic and features needed in the role.

Note: We are planning to test the different vSwitches available to VMWare in the future, if we find one that behaves better we will re-run these tests.