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Configure NSX-T Edge to run on AMD Ryzen CPU

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The vast majority of VMware Homelabs is still Intel-based today but I have been seeing a slow rise of AMD-based kits being adopted, especially with AMD's desktop line of CPUs known as Ryzen. One of the considerations on whether you could use an AMD processor was whether you were planning to deploy NSX-T and in earlier releases, only Intel was supported as the NSX-T Edge required support for Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) and this was only supported with Intel-based processors.

With the latest NSX-T 3.0 release, AMD-based processors are now supported and per the release notes, the following CPUs can be used:

  • AMD EPYC 7xx1 Series (Naples)
  • AMD EPYC 3000 Embedded Family and newer
  • AMD EPYC 7xx2 Series (Rome)

You will notice that only AMD's server line of CPUs known as EPYC are currently supported, which makes sense for running Production workloads. If you attempt to deploy an NSX-T Edge Node running on a non-EPYC platform, you will get an error message stating the CPU is not supported and I figured this was probably due to the lack of DPDK support in the consumer CPUs.

Yesterday, in our internal "Homelab" Slack channel, I came across an interesting tidbit from Andrea Spagnolo, a Sr. Field Engineer in our Cloud Native Business Unit who shared a pretty neat trick on how to get latest NSX-T 3.0 release to work with a Ryzen-based CPU.

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware. The behaviors described here can change in the future

First off, I want to thank Andrea for sharing but also credit to Beniamino Guarnaschelli and his blog post here which actually gave Andrea the idea to take a closer look as he was trying to get this setup in his own personal homelab.

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Hands on with new AMD "NUC" platform from ASRock 

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It has been rumored for some time now that AMD would be re-entering the embedded/small form factor (SFF) market and with their latest generation of Ryzen CPUs, timing could not be more perfect. With the rise of Edge and IoT workloads, new constraints like cost, footprint, low to no tech-touch and power consumption is now top of mind more than ever for customers.

At VMware, we certainly see interests from customers across this spectrum whether it is a traditional "ROBO" environment running a handful of Virtual Machines for a supermarket or retail chain to an industrial site such as an oil rig or factory to mobile infrastructure like a car, ship or even a submarine. On top of these use cases, personal and development labs continue to be extremely popular amongst our customer base for learning and training purposes.

Today, the Intel NUC is still by far the most popular platform due to its size, portability, cost and low power consumption for running VMware vSphere, vSAN & NSX. The idea of an AMD "NUC" kit which includes a chassis, motherboard and CPU is something that that many folks have been asking for. With the market mostly dominated by Intel, I certainly welcome AMD re-entering this market as this will certainly drive new solutions and innovations in this market. With that said, AMD has re-entered into this market and this is initially through partnerships with several OEMs/manufacturers.


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Will Intel’s VMCS Shadowing Feature Benefit VMware’s Nested Virtualization?

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For many years now, VMware customers have been using Nested Virtualization, which is the ability to run a hypervisor such as vSphere ESXi within a virtual machine. Even though Nested Virtualization is not officially supported by VMware, customers have come to rely upon this technology for their lab environments and sometimes even production environments. VMware also heavily relies on this technology for their own internal development as well as their Hands On Lab for VMworld, which is now offered as an online SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) solution called Hands On lab Online.

Performance of Nested Virtualization has come a long way since its first introduction and it continues to get better with advancements made in hardware from both Intel and AMD. A couple of months back, I came across an article discussing a new feature from the upcoming Intel Haswell processor’s called VMCS Shadowing which aims to improve the performance of Nested Virtualization. This got me thinking about whether VMCS Shadowing could benefit VMware’s Nested Virtualization.

VMCS (Virtual Machine Control Structure) Shadowing works by reducing the frequency in which the guest VMM (virtual machine) requires assistance from the parent VMM. Its goal is to eliminate the VM-exits due to VMREAD and VMWRITE instructions executed by the guest hypervisor but this comes at a slight expense.

I reached out to one of the core engineers who helped to develop VMware’s Nested Virtualization technology, Jim Mattson, and asked whether or not we would benefit from the VMCS Shadowing feature. Well, it turns out that VMCS Shadowing can help, but we have also done some research in this area and developed some technology that would allow us to eliminate about 75% due to VMREAD and VMWRITE when running guest VMware Hypervisors using some interesting software techniques. The details of these software techniques are actually published in a research paper called Software Techniques for Avoiding Hardware Virtualization Exits on VMware’s Academic Program which is part of VMware Labs. Jim is one of the authors of the research paper and I would highly recommend you check it out if you are interested in more details.

To summarize, because of the techniques described in the paper, VMCS Shadowing will provide only a small benefit when running a VMware Hypervisor as virtual machine. However, it will greatly benefit other non-VMware Hypervisors running as a virtual machine, this is particular true for Hypervisors that perform egregious number of VMREAD and VMWRITE operations and that do not cluster well, such as VirtualBox for example.

The coolest part about the research and software techniques developed by Jim and team, is that the technology has already been incorporated into the existing VMware vSphere ESXi, Workstation and Fusion products. I often times forget that all the awesome-sauce technology that is being developed by VMware starts out in research academia and you can learn about other research topics by visiting the VMware’s Academic Program which includes publications, research papers and the popular VMware Technical Journals.