dynamic balancing, VSX and core affinity

[Wolfgang]

I need some advice and real world experience from the field.

In VSX environments you have to find a good distribution of your cores to virtual systems. Experience over the years shows it's a good configuration to allocate dedicated cores to heavy used VS. You have to have a look at all your cores and you have to play a little bit with the distribution between cores, VS and processes. But it works.

Now we have Dynamic Balancing for CoreXL with support for VSX. Anything changes with this ?

Can I set all my cores to shared for all VS and dynamic balancing did the work and will distribute everything balanced ?

Maybee it's better to disable dynamic balancing and set affinity with dedicated cores for VS ?

Great Security Gateway Performance Optimization - VSX  in the past initiated by @Kaspars_Zibarts but it would be interesting with an update regarding dynamic balancing.

[Alex-]

I'm running a large VSX environment (25+ VS w/ VSLS) on high-end CP appliances and it doesn't work. I enable dynamic split following the SK, wait for confirmation, reboot then cpview shows Dynamic Balancing Status Initializing then On. After a few minutes, it's back in off status and with 2 SND out of 72 CPU in a loaded environment. Same situation on the secondary cluster member. I'm currently assigning SND with fw ctl affinity after having disabled dynamic_split. R80.40 Take 173, planning to go to R81.10 when the next GA HF is released.

[genisis__]

 Alex - this is the same symptom I experienced.

did you try dynamic_balancing -r  (This worked for bit for me, then reverted back to a couple of cores being stuck in the other state (check cpview)

additionally review the following logs (TAC will need these)

$FWDIR/log/dsd.elg

$FWDIR/log/dynamic_split.elg

[Alex-]

Thanks for the tips genisis, appreciated. No I didn't try the flag as it wasn't clear from the SK it was needed and enabling didn't provide any warnings. Also, I have limited maintenance windows for that cluster given its size and configuration (dynamic routing & co) and had enough reboots as it is. 😄

Manual affinity does the job for now, I will wait R81.10 to explore this feature again.

[genisis__]

I believe dynamic balancing on R81.10 with JHFA75 or above should be good.
# dynamic_balancing -h
-h - Shows built-in help
-o enable - Enables the CoreXL Dynamic Balancing (requires a reboot)
-o disable - Disables the CoreXL Dynamic Balancing (requires a reboot)
-o stop - Stops the CoreXL Dynamic Balancing ("freezes" it; survives a reboot)
-o start - Starts the CoreXL Dynamic Balancing ("resumes" it; survives a reboot)
-p - Shows the current state of the CoreXL Dynamic Balancing
-r - Resets the CoreXL configuration to the default and keeps the CoreXL Dynamic Balancing enabled

[AmitShmuel]

Hi, Take 180 has it fixed.