How to test your PVRDMA network connection in vSphere Bitfusion

By using a performance benchmark tool, you can test the PVRDMA network connection between a vSphere Bitfusion server and client.

By using the InfiniBand send bandwidth tool, ib_send_bw, you can test the network connection speed between your vSphere Bitfusion servers and clients, and verify that your PVRDMA network is configured correctly.

Prerequisites

Verify that your vSphere environment has a PVRDMA distributed network configured. For more information, see the vSphere Networking documentation.
Verify that you have configured a vSphere Bitfusion server to use PVRDMA. See How to configure a vSphere Bitfusion server to use PVRDMA.
Verify that you have configured a vSphere Bitfusion client to use PVRDMA. See How to configure a vSphere Bitfusion client to use PVRDMA.

Procedure

Install the Performance Tests (perftest) package with version 4.4.0-11 for your Linux operating system.
The package includes performance benchmark tools, such as ib_send_bw and ib_send_lat. The 4.4.0-11 version is compatible with the perftest package that is installed on your vSphere Bitfusion servers.
- Ubuntu 20.04
```
sudo apt-get install -y perftest
```
- CentOS 8 and Red Hat Linux 8
```
git clone https://github.com/linux-rdma/perftest.git
cd perftest
git checkout v4.4-0.11
./autogen.sh
./configure
make clean && make V=1
sudo make install
```
From your vSphere Bitfusion server, run the ib_send_bw --report_gbits command.
From your vSphere Bitfusion client, run the ib_send_bw --report_gbits BF_server_IP command, where BF_server_IP is the IP address of the virtual machine of your vSphere Bitfusion server.

Results

Both your vSphere Bitfusion server and client create a bandwidth report.

What to do next

If the report fails or displays unsatisfactory network connection speed, perform one or more of the following steps.

Check your PVDRMA configuration.
Run the ibv_devinfo command on your vSphere Bitfusion client. If the result displays a PORT_DOWN state for the RDMA ports of your network adapter, see PVRDMA is Not Working on a vSphere Bitfusion Client in the Using VMware vSphere Bitfusion.