VMware NSX Bare Metal Edge Performance

Every cloud environment is rooted in virtualization and is defined by three pillars: network virtualization, server virtualization, and storage virtualization. The VMware NSX Edge Node plays an essential role in virtualizing networking and security services. The throughput supported by the NSX Edge Node is critical for the entire ecosystem and network services running on it.

In this blog, we outline NSX Bare Metal Edge performance for customers implementing Bare Metal Edge for their virtual networking infrastructure.  Using NSX Bare Metal Edge (with no services running) with 4x100Gbp interfaces, RFC2544 performance tests yielded a North-South throughput of up to 388 Gbps (97%-line rate) and up to 3 Tbps for the entire cluster (when using 8 Edge Nodes), providing significant throughput for North-South traffic in the virtual network infrastructure.

Please refer to VMware NSX Bare Metal Edge Performance white paper for more information on test and settings used to achieve these results.

Key Hardware Considerations for NSX Bare Metal Edge

The choice of hardware for the NSX Bare Metal Edge is driven by bandwidth requirements and the throughput you want to achieve. Key considerations include:

• Physical NIC: Consider the bandwidth, connectivity, and resiliency requirements for the Bare Metal Edge.
• CPU: NSX Continue reading