Friday, June 30, 2023

Re: BGP Router Hardware Suggestions

On 2023-06-29, Lyndon Nerenberg (VE7TFX/VE6BBM) <lyndon@orthanc.ca> wrote:
> We are about to discover the joys of upstream BGP routing :-P The
> current plan is to use a pair of OpenBSD+bgpd hosts as the routers.
>
> Each host will require 4x10gig ports (SFP+). One of those links
> (to AWS) will be close to saturated, along with the downlink to our
> switches. The other two will only need to carry ~1Gb/s of traffic.
>
> We are pretty much a Supermicro shop, and I'm wondering if anyone
> out there is running a similar setup on SM hardware. My main concern
> is finding NICs that will let us squeeze every last drop of bandwidth
> on the 10gig links.

I don't need full 10G and haven't benchmarked anything recently, but
Hrvoje has done a lot of testing in this area, see comments at
https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=167665861931266&w=2

For servers, look at the AMD boards e.g. M11SDV-based systems like
https://www.supermicro.com/Aplus/system/Embedded/AS-5019D-FTN4.cfm

Sadly Supermicro seem to have stopped doing boards with 4x fibre
module slots, so you'll be stuck with needing PCIe NICs for the
newer boards. (Newer xeon d boards have 2xSFP28 plus copper;
networking on their AMD boards tend to be copper only).

I would probably favour ix(4) i.e. X520 (for one thing, firmware is less
of a moving target..)

> I did run some brief ttcp tests on a pair of SM 1Us (don't have the
> model number handy, maybe 5018-FTN4s?) with add-in Intel cards
> (550s?) and was able to get 700 MBytes/s of throughput. This would
> have been circa the 6.7 or 6.8 releases.

A lot changed since then. See some stats over time at
http://bluhm.genua.de/perform/results/perform.html
(especially forwarding tests).

Don't test packet generation on the box itself if you care about
forwarding. Generate packets elsewhere and pass them through
the device under test.

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