Major Upgrade! ZStack VPC Supports SR-IOV Live Migration, Performance Soars by 2500%

With the deepening of enterprise digital transformation, the stability of cloud computing architecture and network performance have become the key pillars of business success. Especially in the business scenario of high concurrency and large traffic, the traditional VPC (virtual private cloud) network performance bottleneck is increasingly prominent, which has become a “short board” hindering the development of enterprise business. To meet this challenge, the ZStack VPC router not only fully supports SR-IOV (single I / O virtualization) technology, but also supports simultaneous thermal migration with SR-IOV to break traditional network performance bottlenecks and provide enterprises with flexible and reliable network solutions.

1. Pain points for traditional VPC network cards: performance bottlenecks and high latency

Limited performance: Software simulation causes inefficiency

Common VPC routers usually use a virtio-type virtual network card (vNIC) for packet processing.virtio The network card simulates the hardware functions through the software layer to realize the transmission and reception of network data. This approach, while flexible, has significant performance bottlenecks:

High CPU usage: virtio The network card depends on the CPU resources of the virtual machine. With increasing network traffic, the packet processing load gradually increases, resulting in soaring CPU occupancy. In a high concurrency environment, high server CPU load can affect system stability and may even cause a crash.

Throughput limitation: The throughput of the virtio network card is limited by the simulation process, which cannot make full use of the performance of the physical network card, especially in data-intensive application scenarios.

High latency: the multi-layer processing stack increases the response time

virtio Network card transmission data needs to be processed by multiple virtualization layers, each link will introduce additional delay. In business scenarios with high real-time requirements, this delay significantly affects the user experience.

Insufficient reliability: long-term operation is less stable than SR-IOV

In the long-term operation, ordinary virtio network cards may face problems such as virtualization overhead accumulation, CPU resource competition, and increased memory pressure, resulting in decreased stability. The SR-IOV reduces these burdens through hardware direct access, thus providing more stable network performance in long-term operation. In addition, although the DPDK supported by the ZStack V4 version improves the network performance, the DPDK itself has problems such as high CPU and memory footprint, and relatively complex operation and maintenance. As a result, SR-IOV has more advantages in many scenarios, especially in terms of cost, resource consumption, ease of use, and stability.

2. SR-IOV enabling: ZStack VPC overall performance leap

Overview of the SR-IOV technique

SR-IOV (Single Root I / O Virtualization) is a hardware direct-through technology that allows multiple virtual functions (VF) of a physical network card to be assigned directly to different virtual machines. By bypassing the virtualization layer, SR-IOV significantly improves network performance.

Reduce virtualization layer overhead: virtual machines communicate directly with the hardware, greatly reducing latency, and basically close to the physical network card.

Improve throughput capacity: make full use of physical network card bandwidth resources to support higher data throughput.

Reduce the CPU load: Data processing is done by the hardware, freeing up more CPU resources for business applications.

Performance comparison: virtio vs. SR-IOV

As can be seen from the above table, after adopting the SR-IOV, the PPS performance improved by 2500%, the average delay was reduced by 60%, and the CPU occupancy also decreased to the original 1 / 7. This means that under the same hardware conditions, SR-IOV can bring significant performance improvements, making network services more efficient and stable.

Application of actual combat scenarios

The performance improvements of SR-IOV is proven in multiple practical business scenarios:

High concurrency scenario of e-commerce: during the promotion period, the order volume surges, and the SR-IOV network card can carry a higher amount of concurrent requests, ensure the network stability, and optimize the user shopping experience.

Financial real-time trading: In the trading scenario, the low-latency nature of the SR-IOV ensures a quick response to transactions and reduces transaction risk.

Live video platform: The high throughput and low latency features of SR-IOV ensure that smooth images and sound and painting can be achieved even when a large number of users watch the live stream at the same time.

In addition, SR-IOV can also be applied to the Internet of Things (IoT), autonomous driving, telemedicine and other fields, providing strong support for these applications with high requirements for network performance.

3. Load balancing performance improvement: a breakthrough from virtio to SR-IOV

With the introduction of SR-IOV technology, ZStack VPC performs well in the network load balancing task, ensuring the stability and response speed of enterprise applications. The following is the performance comparison of VPC’s load balancing services between virtio and SR-IOV network cards, including the common HTTP, TCP, and UDP protocols.

Performance comparison of HTTP, TCP and UDP protocol:

Data analysis:

1. HTTP protocol performance:

The number of new HTTP connections increased by 129.20%, from 40,000 to 91,679, greatly improving the processing power of the system in high-frequency connectivity scenarios.

The HTTP request rate increased more significantly, with a 137.60% increase from 109k / s to 259k / s, indicating that the SR-IOV card can respond more quickly to large HTTP requests more quickly.

HTTP throughput also improved significantly, increasing by 48.30%, from 7,300 Mbps to 10,826 Mbps, showing higher network transmission efficiency.

2. TCP protocol performance:

The number of new TCP connections has increased by 124.90%, from 44,000 to 98,952, which is particularly important for application scenarios that require frequent short connections.

TCP throughput has increased by 45%, from 7,300 Mbps to 10,586 Mbps, demonstrating excellent data transmission capability.

UDP protocol performance:

The number of concurrent connections in UDP increased by 118.20%, jumping from 55,000 to 120,000, fully demonstrating the advantages in high concurrency situations.

The increase in UDP packet processing rate (pps) is particularly prominent, reaching a staggering 660.90%, from 92,000 pps to 700,000 pps, which is critical for application scenarios that need to process high-frequency small packets.

To sum up, SR-IOV network card has particularly obvious advantages in network performance over Virtio network card, especially in high concurrent connection processing, new connection rate and throughput, which make it have obvious applicability in business scenarios with high performance requirements. The large increase in the packet processing rate in the UDP protocol also provides strong support for strong real-time applications (such as video streaming and online games).

Test Environment and Configuration:

Server hardware configuration

software release

4. Thermal migration and VMHA: a solid backing for business continuity

Thermal migration: an uninterrupted operation and maintenance experience

ZStack VPC Support SR-IOV thermal migration, enabling operation and maintenance personnel to maintain and resource schedule the system without disrupting business:

Non-interruption service: During thermal migration, the VPC router remains running and the service is not aware.

Flexible resource scheduling: dynamically adjust the resource allocation according to the business requirements, and migrate to the appropriate physical machine at any time according to the pressure situation of the physical machine, so as to ensure the stable operation of the business.

Automated operation and maintenance: ZStack VPC Support SR-IOV thermal migration, improve operation and maintenance efficiency and reduce operation and maintenance costs.

VMHA (virtual machine high available): automatic fault recovery

VMHA technology provides automated fault recovery capabilities:

Automatic detection: the system monitors the status of the physical machine nodes in real time, and automatically triggers the VPC to automatically migrate to other available physical machine nodes when abnormalities are found.

Quick switching: The measured data shows that VMHA failover only takes 15 seconds to ensure business continuity.

5. High availability group: flexible master and standby switch, second-level recovery guarantee

Main and backup architecture design

ZStack VPC Introduce the highly availability group (HA Group) mechanism to realize the collaborative work of primary and standby nodes:

Automatic switching: when the main node fails, the system will automatically switch to the standby node, the process is transparent, and the user has no perception.

Flexible configuration: support a variety of specifications configuration, can adjust resources according to business requirements.

Second level without feeling recovery

The high availability group can complete the master and standby switch in seconds. For example, in a fault simulation test, the primary and standby switch only takes 3 seconds, guaranteeing the service without interruption.

Sixth, technical depth analysis

How the SR-IOV works

The SR-IOV enables multi-instantiation of a single physical device through both PF (Physical Function) and VF (Virtual Function). PF is a function of the physical device itself, while VF is a lightweight functional instance created by PF that can be used directly assigned to the virtual machine. Each VF has its own configuration space and can interact with host memory through DMA (direct memory access), greatly reducing CPU engagement and improving data transmission efficiency.

Technical implementation of the high-availability group

The core of the high-availability group is the heartbeat detection and failover mechanism. The heartbeat detection confirms the status of each node by sending signals regularly; once a node fails, the system will immediately start the failover process and guide the traffic to the standby node to ensure uninterrupted service. In addition, the high availability group also supports predefined health check strategies, which can be customized according to specific business requirements, further enhancing the flexibility and reliability of the system.

Vii. Case Analysis of industrial applications

Practice in the e-commerce industry

A large supermarket platform in the holiday promotion period, facing a huge traffic impact. By deploying ZStack VPC and enabling SR-IOV technology, the platform successfully responded with more than millions of concurrent requests, ensuring a smooth shopping experience for users. Especially in the payment process, thanks to the low latency characteristics brought by SR-IOV, the success rate of payment has reached an unprecedented height, effectively avoiding the transaction failure caused by network problems.

Exploration of the financial industry

A well-known securities company has adopted ZStack VPC and its high usability group function to build a stable and efficient trading platform. On this platform, all transactions can be completed within the millisecond level, greatly improving customer satisfaction. More importantly, even in emergencies, such as power failures or hardware damage, the high-availability group can respond quickly, switching the service to standby nodes, ensuring the continuity and security of the transaction.

Innovation in the field of live video streaming

A leading live video platform uses ZStack VPC to achieve content distribution worldwide. With the high throughput and low latency of SR-IOV, the platform can easily handle real-time viewing requests of tens of millions of users, ensuring that video playback is smooth and free. In addition, the platform can flexibly adjust the resource allocation and optimize the user experience.

VIII. Future Outlook

With the development of emerging technologies such as 5G and edge computing, the network performance requirements in the cloud computing environment will become higher and higher. ZStack VPC Will continue to adhere to the concept of technological innovation, constantly optimize and improve its products and services, and is committed to providing users with more excellent network experience. In the future, ZStack VPC will not only continue to enhance the functions of SR-IOV and high availability groups on the existing basis, but also actively explore AI-driven intelligent operation and maintenance solutions to help enterprises better cope with the complex and changeable market environment.

Nine, conclusion

ZStack VPC Through SR-IOV technology and high availability architecture, to achieve a leap in network performance, helping enterprises to move towards a more stable and more efficient future. With lower latency, higher throughput, and greater recovery, ZStack VPC has become a good choice for digital transformation. We look forward to working together with more partners to jointly promote the development of the cloud computing industry and create infinite possibilities.