sFlow support in InfiniBand

[Ariel Almog]

InfiniBand is a protocol, used in data centers, high speed trading and super computers.  The characteristics  of InfiniBand are high throughput, low latency protocol with connection QoS and high availability .

The following draft specification defines an sFlow sample of InfiniBand traffic & counter structures for reporting information from InfiniBand ports.

http://sflow.org/draft_sflow_infiniband.txt

Please comment on the draft so we can move to finalize the specification.

I would like to thank Peter Phaal for helping me with this contribution.

 

Thanks,

Ariel Almog

Mellanox Technologies

[Chris Hunter]

A brief scan of the draft suggests it will use the perfquery command to collect metrics. There are some quirks to using perfquery. You may wish to look at the write-up from collectl project about their experience monitoring IB with perfquery.

http://collectl.sourceforge.net/Infiniband.html

Further we discovered some proprietary fabric managers complain when modify perfquery counters outside of their interface. This is a problem if your subnet manager is running embedded on your IB switch.

[Ariel Almog]

Hi Chris

Thank you for your response.

It looks tome like an implementation issue that can be addressed by the system provider. for example, the system can have a mode where the performance manager performs only "read" and not "read & clear" when reading performance counters.

Does it looks OK? Do you have any other proposal on the way to deal with it?

Thanks,
Ariel