Cisco UCS supports RoCE for Microsoft SMB Direct

As you may know we use SMB as the storage protocol for several Hyper-V deployments using Scale-Out File Server and Storage Spaces which adds a lot value to your Hyper-V deployments. To boost performance Microsoft is using RDMA or SMB Direct to accelerate Storage network performance.

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 Server 2012 and later versions use RDMA for accelerating and improving the performance of SMB file sharing traffic and Live Migration. If you need to know more about RDMA or SMB Direct checkout my blog post: Hyper-V over SMB: SMB Direct

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

Guidelines and Limitations for SMB Direct with RoCE

Checkout my post about Hyper-V over SMB:

• What is Hyper-V over SMB
• Hyper-V over SMB: Multichannel
• Hyper-V over SMB: SMB Direct (RDMA)
• Hyper-V over SMB: Scale-Out File Server and Storage Spaces
• Hyper-V over SMB: SMB Bandwidth Limits
• Hyper-V over SMB: Constrained Delegation via PowerShell