Sizing Service Engines

Overview

Avi Networks publishes minimum and recommended resource requirements for new Avi Service Engines. However, network and application traffic may vary. This guide provides some guidance on sizing. You can consult with your local Avi sales engineer for more recommendation that is tailored to the exact requirements.

Note for deploying into AWS: The Installing Avi Vantage in Amazon Web Services article provides additional sizing guidance unique to the AWS environment, including this link to Amazon’s own guidance on various maxima.

Avi Service Engines can be configured with as little as 1 vCPU core and 1 GB RAM, or up to 64 vCPU cores and 256 GB RAM. In write access mode, Service Engine resources for newly created SEs can be configured within the SE Group properties. When creating an Avi SE in read or no access modes, Avi SE resources are allocated manually by an administrator via the hypervisor or by the size hardware used for bare metal servers.

CPU

CPU scales very linearly as more cores are added. Note that Avi Vantage cannot differentiate between a physical core and a hyperthreaded core, which generally provides reduced performance compared to a physical core. CPU is a primary factor in SSL handshakes (TPS), throughput, compression, and WAF inspection. For vCenter clouds, the default is 1 CPU core, not reserved. However, CPU reservation is encouraged.

Memory

Memory scales near linearly. It is used for concurrent connections and HTTP caching. Doubling the memory will double the ability of the Avi Service Engine to perform these tasks. The default is 2 GB memory, reserved within the hypervisor for VMware clouds. Refer to SE Memory Consumption for more details.

PPS

PPS is most likely limited by the hypervisor. Limitations are different for each hypervisor and version. SR-IOV or PCIe Passthrough can be used in some environments to bypass PPS limitations of the hypervisor and provide line rate speeds. PPS limits on Bare metal (no hypervisor) depend on the type of NIC used and how Receive Side Scaling (RSS) is leveraged.

For more details on Receive Side Scaling (RSS) refer to TSO, GRO, RSS, and Blocklist Feature on Avi Vantage guide.

RPS

RPS is dependent on the CPU or the PPS limits. It indicates the performance of the CPU and the limit of PPS that the SE can push. The following table provides the value of RPS per core for different ecosystems:

Ecosystem RPS per core
GCP
Gen 1 VM
~30k
VMware
v3 intel servers
~40k
Baremetal
v3 intel servers
~40k
AWS
c5 instance family
~40k
Azure
FS_v2 instance family
DS_v2 instance family

~30k
~20k
CSP
CSP5K hardware
~60k

On an average, the RPS per core would be around 35 to 40k.

Disk

Avi Service Engines may store logs locally before they are sent to the Avi Controllers for indexing. Increasing the disk will increase the log retention on the SE. SSD is preferred over hard drives, as they can write the log data faster. This is not a requirement. The recommended minimum size for storage is 15 GB, ((2 * RAM) + 5 GB) or 15 GB, whichever is greater. 15 GB is the default for SEs deployed in VMware clouds.

Disk Capacity for Logs

Avi Vantage computes the disk capacity it can use for logs based on equations incorporating the following parameters:

  • T, the SE’s total disk capacity
  • N, the number of CPU cores
  • M, the main memory (RAM) of the SE
  • p, log_agent_max_storage_ignore_percent, a parameter in SE runtime properties
  • D, the capacity reserved for debug logs
  • C (reserved for cores), 2 * M
  • MIN, the minimum size allocated for logs
  • L, the capacity reserved for client logs

Avi Vantage calculates D as follows:


D = p * T / 100

Initially, Avi Vantage sets L, the client log size, as follows:


L = T - D

Finally, Avi Vantage adjusts L and C based on the following conditions:


  if L > C + MIN, then set L to (L - C)
    else if L > MIN, then set C to L - MIN and then set L to MIN
       else set C to 0