{"id":7327,"date":"2021-12-07T14:09:53","date_gmt":"2021-12-07T14:09:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.insentragroup.com\/au\/?p=7327"},"modified":"2024-09-20T03:28:10","modified_gmt":"2024-09-20T03:28:10","slug":"enhancing-citrix-mcs-and-microsoft-azure-part-2-accelerated-networking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.insentragroup.com\/au\/insights\/geek-speak\/cloud-and-modern-data-center\/enhancing-citrix-mcs-and-microsoft-azure-part-2-accelerated-networking\/","title":{"rendered":"Enhancing Citrix MCS and Microsoft Azure \u2013 Part 2: Accelerated Networking"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Adding capability for Accelerated Networking with Citrix MCS provisioned workloads.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This is the second part of an ongoing series around enhancing Citrix MCS within Azure. The first post<\/a> focused on optimising identity disk costs via\u00a0PowerShell and Azure Automation<\/a>. This is post will tackle one of the biggest impacting performance optimisations you can make to machines within Azure: Accelerated Networking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Accelerated Networking<\/a>\u00a0is defined by Microsoft as:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Accelerated networking enables single root I\/O virtualisation (SR-IOV) to a VM, greatly improving its networking performance. This high-performance path bypasses the host from the data path, which reduces latency, jitter and CPU utilisation for the most demanding network workloads on supported VM types<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Recapping on what we discussed last time, MCS in Azure uses on-demand provisioning which means for pooled or newly provisioned workloads (in the case of dedicated), which, when the machine is not powered on, it simply does not exist. The only evidence of the powered off machines existence (typically, and this assumes MCSIO is not in play) is a single identity disk and a single Network Interface. When the machine is powered on, it is created \u201con demand\u201d based on the provided provisioning scheme (ProvScheme). A new OSDisk is created (full cloned) and both the Identity disk and Network Interface attached to the machine at creation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the context of this article, we are interested in the Network Interface. Accelerated Networking is configured on the Network Interface object itself, which works in conjunction with selected VM sizes and Operating Systems within the Azure Platform.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the time of writing, I would like to point out both the\u00a0supported operating systems<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0supported VM instances<\/a>\u00a0are not reflective of what Azure is supporting. For instance, there is no mention of Windows 10 enterprise multi-session being supported, nor any mention of NV series machines. If you spin up a new machine in the portal, you will find accelerated networking is enabled by default (which only happens on a supported mix of OS and VM Instance sizes), and more importantly, the functionality of Accelerated Networking is perfectly fine across both NV series and Windows 10 Enterprise Multi-Session instances.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Accelerated Networking requires a Mellanox driver. This driver is injected at machine boot and does not need to exist on the master image as demonstrated below<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I have seen massive performance increases when enabling Accelerated Networking, the results can be staggering when enabled the whole way through (server and client) and as such, should be enabled everywhere it can be. Unfortunately, at the time of writing, MCS doesn\u2019t provide any mechanism to enable this feature, PowerShell however, most certainly does.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have written a script which does the following:<\/p>\n\n\n\n