Enable NetQ Receive Side Scaling to enable vNIC requests to be offloaded to a physical NIC. It improves packet performance of the receive-side data.
Starting with NSX 4.1.0 and ESXi 8.0, NSX supports NetQ Receive Side Scaling. When a physical NIC card sends packets to a host, the Enhanced Network Stack (ENS), which runs as the host switch is configured in Enhanced Datapath mode, on that host distributes data across different logical cores on NUMA nodes. There are a couple of ways to configure RSS engines.
As a network admin wanting to improve the throughput packet performance of receive-side data, you might want to consider one of these ways to configure RSS to leverage the benefits.
These two modes are:
- RSS engine is dedicated to a single vNIC queue: A dedicated RSS engine completely offloads any request coming from a vNIC to the physical NIC. In this mode, a single RSS engine is dedicated to a single vNIC queue. It improves throughput performance as pNIC manages the recieve side data and shares it among the available hardware queues to serve the request. The vNIC queues are co-located on the same logical core or fastpath as pnic queues.
- RSS engine is shared by multiple vNIC queues: In this mode, multiple hardware queues are made available to vNIC queues. However, the vNIC handling flows might not be aligned with the physical hardware queue that will process data. It means, there is no guarantee that vNIC and physical NICs will be aligned.
Note: If Default Queue Receive Side Scaling (DRSS) is enabled on the NIC card, deactivate it.
Prerequisites
- Hosts must be running ESXi version 8 or later.
- Ensure NIC card supports RSS functionality.
- EDP NETQ RSS is supported from NSX 4.0 and ESXi version 8.0 onwards. Supported inbox drivers are Intel40en (async driver) and Mellanox nmlx. Refer to the driver documentation to confirm whether it has ENS compatible RSS implementation.