Intel Ethernet Network Adapter - HyperV and ESX Performance Testing

Project Name	:	Intel Ethernet network Adapter - HyperV and ESX Performance Testing
Project Duration	:	NOV 2021 - Till Now
Job Designation	:	Driver Validation Engineer
Organization	:	Intel - India

Project Description :

This project aimed to collect the East to West and North to South Virtualization traffic Throughput performance of Intel Ethernet Network adapters for VMDq/VMQ, SR-IOV, PCIe passthrough/Direct PCIe assignment features.

Roles and Responsbilites :

Prepared Test strategy document for SR-IOV, VMDq/VMQ, Direct-PCIe assignment/PCIe passthrough Virtualization feature
Reseting BIOS configuration to default values and applying tunned BIOS configuration manually
Bringing up Test system: By installing VMware ESXi OS
Configure Test feature and required vSwitch/DVS
Bringing up Multiple VMs configured with test requriement feature.
Applying performance tunned configuration to Kernel, OS, network adapter and Traffic generator applications based on test requirement.
Executing Virtualalization Traffic Throughput performance test by manullay or using automated scripts using iperf or Netperf traffic generator to collect following performance data sets with CPU utilization of the SUT test system:

TCP Traffic Buffer Size = 32 to 65535
UDP Traffic Buffer Size = 32 to MAX MTU Size
Number of Traffic Threads = 1 to MAX Number of Test system CPU Cores
Number of Test ports in Ethernet Adapter = 1 to MAX number of PF ports supported in Network Adapter
Traffic Directions = UX (TX , RX) and BX

Analyse collected results, prepare a report for it and share it to team and management

Technologies and Tools Used :

iPerf2 and Netperf	:	used for collecting TCP and UDP Traffic Throughput Performance Data
Shell and python script	:	used pyVim, pyVmomi, ssl, requests, parmiko, subprocess, os, logging, time, tabulate, csv python modules to automate End to End Test
PowerCLI	:	used for configuring Vcenter and VMs
BAT and Powershell script	:	used for collecting HyperV Throughput Performance data on Windows Server OS

Challenges :

Configuring virtualization and its feature manually on Host system or Guest VM will take more time and high risk in end up with mistakes and misconfiguration.
Collecting Throughput performance test result by manually will takes days. If each traffic test executes for 30 seconds

Achievements :

using Powercli, shell, powershell commands and python paramiko pyVim pyVmomi modules automated configuring virtualization feature
Reduced execution time to Half without manuall intervention using standalone automation script
Automated script will take care below things

configuring virtualization features like SR-IOV, VMDq, Direct PCI-e passthrough
Appplying Performance Tunning configurations to Host, Guest systems and Test Network Adapters
Installing Traffic Generator Tools and other required depedencies packages, apps, libs on all required systems
Collecting Test Host and Guest System information - OS details, Network Adapter details, Kernel details, hardware information and other basic informations
Testing connectivity between SUT VM to each client test VMs
If connectivity check passed, start execuing LAN performance test with multiple scalable parameters and parelly collecting each test execution logs
Each test will collect Throughput data, Host & Guest CPU utilization data and execution logs.
Collected data will redirect to Excel CSV file

Products Tested :

Link to Portfolio or GitHubs :