Host network requirements for Azure Stack HCI

Applies to: Azure Stack HCI, version 22H2

This topic discusses host networking considerations and requirements for Azure Stack HCI. For information on datacenter architectures and the physical connections between servers, see Physical network requirements.

For information on how to simplify host networking using Network ATC, see Simplify host networking with Network ATC.

Network traffic types

Azure Stack HCI network traffic can be classified by its intended purpose:

• Management traffic: Traffic to or from outside the local cluster. For example, storage replica traffic or traffic used by the administrator for management of the cluster like Remote Desktop, Windows Admin Center, Active Directory, etc.
• Compute traffic: Traffic originating from or destined to a virtual machine (VM).
• Storage traffic: Traffic using Server Message Block (SMB), for example Storage Spaces Direct or SMB-based live migration. This traffic is layer-2 traffic and is not routable.

Select a network adapter

Network adapters are qualified by the network traffic types (see above) they are supported for use with. As you review the Windows Server Catalog, the Windows Server 2022 certification now indicates one or more of the following roles. Before purchasing a server for Azure Stack HCI, you must minimally have at least one adapter that is qualified for management, compute, and storage as all three traffic types are required on Azure Stack HCI. You can then use Network ATC to configure your adapters for the appropriate traffic types.

For more information about this role-based NIC qualification, please see this link.

Level	Management Role	Compute Role	Storage Role
Role-based distinction	Management	Compute Standard	Storage Standard
Maximum Award	Not Applicable	Compute Premium	Storage Premium

Driver Requirements

Inbox drivers are not supported for use with Azure Stack HCI. To identify if your adapter is using an inbox driver, run the following cmdlet. An adapter is using an inbox driver if the DriverProvider property is Microsoft.

Get-NetAdapter -Name <AdapterName> | Select *Driver*

Overview of key network adapter capabilities

Important network adapter capabilities used by Azure Stack HCI include:

• Dynamic Virtual Machine Multi-Queue (Dynamic VMMQ or d.VMMQ)
• Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA)
• Guest RDMA
• Switch Embedded Teaming (SET)

Dynamic VMMQ

All network adapters with the Compute (Premium) qualification support Dynamic VMMQ. Dynamic VMMQ requires the use of Switch Embedded Teaming.

Applicable traffic types: compute

Certifications required: Compute (Premium)

Dynamic VMMQ is an intelligent, receive-side technology. It builds upon its predecessors of Virtual Machine Queue (VMQ), Virtual Receive Side Scaling (vRSS), and VMMQ, to provide three primary improvements:

• Optimizes host efficiency by using fewer CPU cores.
• Automatic tuning of network traffic processing to CPU cores, thus enabling VMs to meet and maintain expected throughput.
• Enables "bursty" workloads to receive the expected amount of traffic.

For more information on Dynamic VMMQ, see the blog post Synthetic accelerations.

RDMA

RDMA is a network stack offload to the network adapter. It allows SMB storage traffic to bypass the operating system for processing.

RDMA enables high-throughput, low-latency networking, using minimal host CPU resources. These host CPU resources can then be used to run additional VMs or containers.

Applicable traffic types: host storage

Certifications required: Storage (Standard)

All adapters with Storage (Standard) or Storage (Premium) qualification support host-side RDMA. For more information on using RDMA with guest workloads, see the "Guest RDMA" section later in this article.

Azure Stack HCI supports RDMA with either the Internet Wide Area RDMA Protocol (iWARP) or RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) protocol implementations.

Not all network adapters from vendors support RDMA. The following table lists those vendors (in alphabetical order) that offer certified RDMA adapters. However, there are hardware vendors not included in this list that also support RDMA. See the Windows Server Catalog to find adapters with the Storage (Standard) or Storage (Premium) qualification which require RDMA support.

NIC vendor	iWARP	RoCE
Broadcom	No	Yes
Intel	Yes	Yes (some models)
Marvell (Qlogic)	Yes	Yes
Nvidia	No	Yes

For more information on deploying RDMA for the host, we highly recommend you use Network ATC. For information on manual deployment see the SDN GitHub repo.

iWARP

iWARP uses Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), and can be optionally enhanced with Priority-based Flow Control (PFC) and Enhanced Transmission Service (ETS).

Use iWARP if:

• You don't have experience managing RDMA networks.
• You don't manage or are uncomfortable managing your top-of-rack (ToR) switches.
• You won't be managing the solution after deployment.
• You already have deployments that use iWARP.
• You're unsure which option to choose.

RoCE

RoCE uses User Datagram Protocol (UDP), and requires PFC and ETS to provide reliability.

Use RoCE if:

• You already have deployments with RoCE in your datacenter.
• You're comfortable managing the DCB network requirements.

Guest RDMA

Guest RDMA enables SMB workloads for VMs to gain the same benefits of using RDMA on hosts.

Applicable traffic types: Guest-based storage

Certifications required: Compute (Premium)

The primary benefits of using Guest RDMA are:

• CPU offload to the NIC for network traffic processing.
• Extremely low latency.
• High throughput.

For more information, download the document from the SDN GitHub repo.

Switch Embedded Teaming (SET)

SET is a software-based teaming technology that has been included in the Windows Server operating system since Windows Server 2016. SET is the only teaming technology supported by Azure Stack HCI. SET works well with compute, storage, and management traffic and is supported with up to eight adapters in the same team.

Applicable traffic types: compute, storage, and management

Certifications required: Compute (Standard) or Compute (Premium)

SET is the only teaming technology supported by Azure Stack HCI. SET works well with compute, storage, and management traffic.

SET is important for Azure Stack HCI because it's the only teaming technology that enables:

• Teaming of RDMA adapters (if needed).
• Guest RDMA.
• Dynamic VMMQ.
• Other key Azure Stack HCI features (see Teaming in Azure Stack HCI).

SET requires the use of symmetric (identical) adapters. Symmetric network adapters are those that have the same:

• make (vendor)
• model (version)
• speed (throughput)
• configuration

In 22H2, Network ATC will automatically detect and inform you if the adapters you've chosen are asymmetric. The easiest way to manually identify if adapters are symmetric is if the speeds and interface descriptions are exact matches. They can deviate only in the numeral listed in the description. Use the Get-NetAdapterAdvancedProperty cmdlet to ensure the configuration reported lists the same property values.

See the following table for an example of the interface descriptions deviating only by numeral (#):

Name	Interface description	Link speed
NIC1	Network Adapter #1	25 Gbps
NIC2	Network Adapter #2	25 Gbps
NIC3	Network Adapter #3	25 Gbps
NIC4	Network Adapter #4	25 Gbps

RDMA traffic considerations

If you implement DCB, you must ensure that the PFC and ETS configuration is implemented properly across every network port, including network switches. DCB is required for RoCE and optional for iWARP.

For detailed information on how to deploy RDMA, download the document from the SDN GitHub repo.

RoCE-based Azure Stack HCI implementations require the configuration of three PFC traffic classes, including the default traffic class, across the fabric and all hosts.

Cluster traffic class

This traffic class ensures that there's enough bandwidth reserved for cluster heartbeats:

• Required: Yes
• PFC-enabled: No
• Recommended traffic priority: Priority 7
• Recommended bandwidth reservation:
  • 10 GbE or lower RDMA networks = 2 percent
  • 25 GbE or higher RDMA networks = 1 percent

RDMA traffic class

This traffic class ensures that there's enough bandwidth reserved for lossless RDMA communications by using SMB Direct:

• Required: Yes
• PFC-enabled: Yes
• Recommended traffic priority: Priority 3 or 4
• Recommended bandwidth reservation: 50 percent

Default traffic class

This traffic class carries all other traffic not defined in the cluster or RDMA traffic classes, including VM traffic and management traffic:

• Required: By default (no configuration necessary on the host)
• Flow control (PFC)-enabled: No
• Recommended traffic class: By default (Priority 0)
• Recommended bandwidth reservation: By default (no host configuration required)

Storage traffic models

SMB provides many benefits as the storage protocol for Azure Stack HCI, including SMB Multichannel. SMB Multichannel isn't covered in this article, but it's important to understand that traffic is multiplexed across every possible link that SMB Multichannel can use.

Consider the following example of a four node cluster. Each server has two storage ports (left and right side). Because each adapter is on the same subnet and VLAN, SMB Multichannel will spread connections across all available links. Therefore, the left-side port on the first server (192.168.1.1) will make a connection to the left-side port on the second server (192.168.1.2). The right-side port on the first server (192.168.1.12) will connect to the right-side port on the second server. Similar connections are established for the third and fourth servers.

However, this creates unnecessary connections and causes congestion at the interlink (multi-chassis link aggregation group or MC-LAG) that connects the ToR switches (marked with Xs). See the following diagram:

The recommended approach is to use separate subnets and VLANs for each set of adapters. In the following diagram, the right-hand ports now use subnet 192.168.2.x /24 and VLAN2. This allows traffic on the left-side ports to remain on TOR1 and the traffic on the right-side ports to remain on TOR2.

Traffic bandwidth allocation

The following table shows example bandwidth allocations of various traffic types, using common adapter speeds, in Azure Stack HCI. Note that this is an example of a converged solution, where all traffic types (compute, storage, and management) run over the same physical adapters, and are teamed by using SET.

Because this use case poses the most constraints, it represents a good baseline. However, considering the permutations for the number of adapters and speeds, this should be considered an example and not a support requirement.

The following assumptions are made for this example:

• There are two adapters per team.

• Storage Bus Layer (SBL), Cluster Shared Volume (CSV), and Hyper-V (Live Migration) traffic:

  • Use the same physical adapters.
  • Use SMB.

• SMB is given a 50 percent bandwidth allocation by using DCB.

  • SBL/CSV is the highest priority traffic, and receives 70 percent of the SMB bandwidth reservation.
  • Live Migration (LM) is limited by using the Set-SMBBandwidthLimit cmdlet, and receives 29 percent of the remaining bandwidth.

    • If the available bandwidth for Live Migration is >= 5 Gbps, and the network adapters are capable, use RDMA. Use the following cmdlet to do so:

      Set-VMHost -VirtualMachineMigrationPerformanceOption SMB
      

    • If the available bandwidth for Live Migration is < 5 Gbps, use compression to reduce blackout times. Use the following cmdlet to do so:

      Set-VMHost -VirtualMachineMigrationPerformanceOption Compression
      

• If you're using RDMA for Live Migration traffic, ensure that Live Migration traffic can't consume the entire bandwidth allocated to the RDMA traffic class by using an SMB bandwidth limit. Be careful, because this cmdlet takes entry in bytes per second (Bps), whereas network adapters are listed in bits per second (bps). Use the following cmdlet to set a bandwidth limit of 6 Gbps, for example:

  Set-SMBBandwidthLimit -Category LiveMigration -BytesPerSecond 750MB
  

  Note

  750 MBps in this example equates to 6 Gbps.

Here is the example bandwidth allocation table:

NIC speed	Teamed bandwidth	SMB bandwidth reservation**	SBL/CSV %	SBL/CSV bandwidth	Live Migration %	Max Live Migration bandwidth	Heartbeat %	Heartbeat bandwidth
10 Gbps	20 Gbps	10 Gbps	70%	7 Gbps	*	200 Mbps
25 Gbps	50 Gbps	25 Gbps	70%	17.5 Gbps	29%	7.25 Gbps	1%	250 Mbps
40 Gbps	80 Gbps	40 Gbps	70%	28 Gbps	29%	11.6 Gbps	1%	400 Mbps
50 Gbps	100 Gbps	50 Gbps	70%	35 Gbps	29%	14.5 Gbps	1%	500 Mbps
100 Gbps	200 Gbps	100 Gbps	70%	70 Gbps	29%	29 Gbps	1%	1 Gbps
200 Gbps	400 Gbps	200 Gbps	70%	140 Gbps	29%	58 Gbps	1%	2 Gbps

* Use compression rather than RDMA, because the bandwidth allocation for Live Migration traffic is <5 Gbps.

** 50 percent is an example bandwidth reservation.

Stretched clusters

Stretched clusters provide disaster recovery that spans multiple datacenters. In its simplest form, a stretched Azure Stack HCI cluster network looks like this:

Stretched cluster requirements

Stretched clusters have the following requirements and characteristics:

• RDMA is limited to a single site, and isn't supported across different sites or subnets.

• Servers in the same site must reside in the same rack and Layer-2 boundary.

• Host communication between sites must cross a Layer-3 boundary; stretched Layer-2 topologies aren't supported.

• Have enough bandwidth to run the workloads at the other site. In the event of a failover, the alternate site will need to run all traffic. We recommend that you provision sites at 50 percent of their available network capacity. This isn't a requirement, however, if you are able to tolerate lower performance during a failover.

• Adapters used for communication between sites:

  • Can be physical or virtual (host vNIC). If adapters are virtual, you must provision one vNIC in its own subnet and VLAN per physical NIC.

  • Must be on their own subnet and VLAN that can route between sites.

  • RDMA must be disabled by using the Disable-NetAdapterRDMA cmdlet. We recommend that you explicitly require Storage Replica to use specific interfaces by using the Set-SRNetworkConstraint cmdlet.

  • Must meet any additional requirements for Storage Replica.

Next steps

• Learn about network switch and physical network requirements. See Physical network requirements.
• Learn how to simplify host networking using Network ATC. See Simplify host networking with Network ATC.
• Brush up on failover clustering networking basics.
• For deployment, see Create a cluster using Windows Admin Center.
• For deployment, see Create a cluster using Windows PowerShell.