Friday, August 19, 2011

Load Sharing and Load Balancing

Load sharing and load balancing are two functions which are frequently confused when talking about SAN performance.  When balancing loads, the concept would be to balance the “potential” flows within the available pathways.  Brocade provides techniques for carrying out both functions and today’s blog talks about the variations between individuals techniques poor FICON conditions.
FICON conditions demand performance and require robustness.  These needs necessitate the requirement to implement load shaping in cascaded fabric designs.  The Brocade software feature that supports this capacity is known as Lossless (as with Lossless DLS and Lossless DPS) and is just one of several load balancing and Load sharing features in FOS.
Load sharing and load balancing across ISLs is definitely an implementation dependent behavior however, you will find qualities of FICON that influence the options a person can deploy in a particular atmosphere. With nevertheless, the different techniques utilized by Brocade implementations are referred to below.


Load Balancing"Fundamental load balancing" is really a technique performed at Fabric Login time. This assignment is bound for that duration the device is available within the fabric and it is only transformed if your fabric event happens affecting a job (i.e. the designated ISL leaves the material, the destination domain leaves the material, an intermediate domain or ISL leaves the material, etc). The balancing criteria utilized in this will be to balance the entire "number" of products over the available ISLs. For instance, if twelve products login and you will find three ISLs, this process assigns four products to every ISL. Note, however, that actual traffic flow towards the destination domain offered through the ISLs isn't considered within the assignment.
Although an attempt is built to keep things in balance between your "count of records" per ISL, this process suffers when either the particular load transpires with land on the couple of ISLs or when fabric occasions occur that pressure the flows onto a subset from the ISLs. This fundamental technique is utilized by all Fibre Funnel switch suppliers with very minor variations between your implementations.
The Brocade software feature that supports this process is known as Port Based Routing.
"Dynamic load balancing" is supplied by some suppliers and changes the "count of records" designated to every ISL each time a fabric event happens. Load sharing

Load SharingLoad sharing happens once the switch propagates the particular flow levels between a set of domain names over the available ISLs. "Hardware based trunks" mix a number of ISLs together to create a virtual ISL which has an aggregated bandwidth comparable to the sum bandwidths of every individual ISL. Typically, this balancing is handled in the port ASIC level and it is performed in the frame level. Some implementations spread the frames across each ISL inside a round-robin fashion, others spread the frames inside a random fashion, but still others spread the frames within an overflow or flooding fashion. The Brocade hardware feature that supports hardware trunks is known as Trunking and uses either the round-robin method (2G and 4G items) or even the flooding method (8G items).
"Software based trunks" mix several ISLs together to aggregate the bandwidth between a set of domain names. The aggregated bandwidth is again comparable to the sum bandwidths of the baby ISLs, however the techniques of balancing the bandwidth between your ISLs is different from the strategy employed for hardware trunks. This process uses programmatic techniques plus hardware support to talk about the traffic and, as a result, is restricted to discussing calculations that balance flows or trades rather than frames. The Brocade software feature that supports this process is known as Dynamic Path Selection (DPS).
Also, Port Based Routing can be used because the default load balancing and Load sharing method.  Once Lossless DLS or Lossless DPS is switched on then your dynamic techniques would customize the projects accordingly.
Load Sharing and Load Balancing

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