RoCE supported for W2016 ?

[Walter Dey]

RDMA Over Converged Ethernet for SMB Direct

RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) allows direct memory access over an Ethernet network. RoCE is a link layer protocol, and hence, it allows communication between any two hosts in the same Ethernet broadcast domain. RoCE delivers superior performance compared to traditional network socket implementations because of lower latency, lower CPU utilization and higher utilization of network bandwidth. Windows 2012 and later versions use RDMA for accelerating and improving the performance of SMB file sharing and Live Migration.

Cisco UCS Manager Release 2.2(4) supports RoCE for Microsoft SMB Direct. It sends additional configuration information to the adapter while creating or modifying an Ethernet adapter policy.

Microsoft SMB Direct with RoCE is supported only on Windows 2012 R2.

Is RoCE now also supported for Windows Server 2016 ?

[Wes Austin]

Hey Walter,

I will reach out to some internal folks and see if we can get an answer for you, as I know a lot of customers like to take advantage of RoCE on the VICs.

-Wes

[Walter Dey]

MSFT is pushing RoCE and therefore replacing FC and EMC, IBM,.... storage

Working with MSFT I found some very interesting facts; they use RoCE and DAS for their Azure cloud.

The following 2 references explain the problems with scale out (multihop) RoCE

https://www.hpcwire.com/2015/11/30/roce-fails-to-scale-the-dangers-of-sliding-down-the-roce-path/

http://www.chelsio.com/wp-content/uploads/resources/RoCE-Deployment-Challenges-for-Clouds.pdf

and this 2 references, that MSFT has addressed above issues and fixed it.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/rdma_sigcomm2016.pdf

RDMA over Commodity Ethernet at Scale

 https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/09/microsoft_sonic_debian/

Microsoft has crafted a switch OS on Debian Linux. Repeat, a switch OS on Debian Linux

More information about Sonic https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/ocp-2016-building-on-community-driven-innovation/