Physical Design of the Avi Vantage Platform

Overview

The physical design includes defining the configuration requirements of the underlying ESXi hosts implemented by VMware Cloud Foundation.

When designing and implementing the Avi Vantage Platform, it is important that the physical ESXi hosts where the Avi Service Engines will reside have certain BIOS features configured to help with application performance. The BIOS features that impact application performance are:

  • Advanced Encryption Standard-New Instructions (AES-NI) — An instruction set used to improve the speed (as well as the resistance to side-channel attacks) of applications performing encryption and decryption using Advanced Encryption Standard (AES).

The following table summarizes the design decisions for physical design of ESXi hosts in the management domain:

Decision ID Design Decision Design Justification Design Implication
AVI-PHY-001 High performance disks (SSD /Flash) Avi Controllers need high disk capacity to process analytics pipeline Degradation of analytics pipeline on the Avi Controllers.
Disk locking could cause control plane instability

Note: It is recommended but not required to disable C-State and P-State setting in the BIOS for ESX hosts that would be used to host Avi Service Engines.

The following table summarizes the design decisions for physical design of ESXi hosts in the workload domain:

Decision ID Design Decision Design Justification Design Implication
AVI-PHY-002 Enable AES-NI instruction set for ESX hosts AES-NI instruction set provides efficiency in SSL performance SSL performance would be sub-par
AVI-PHY-003 High performance disks (SSD /Flash) Avi Service Engines write client logs locally to disk before they are shipped to the Avi Controller Degradation of analytics pipeline on the Avi Service Engines.
Disk locking could cause data plane instability
AVI-PHY-004 Use high bandwidth NICs as uplinks for the ESX hosts (at least 10GB) Having high bandwidth uplinks ensures physical network is not the bottleneck for application performance Physical network might cause a bottleneck for application performance