The Ipperf Option - Brocade Communications Systems 8 Administrator's Manual

The ipperf option

NOTE
The ipperf option is for 7500 switches and FR4-18i blades. It does not work with 7800 switches and
FX8-24 blades.
The ipperf option allows you to specify the slot and port information for displaying performance
statistics for a pair of ports. For this basic configuration, you can specify the IP addresses of the
endpoints, target bandwidth for the path, and optional parameters such as the length of time to
run the test and statistic polling interval.
Only a single ipperf session can be active on an FCIP GbE port at any time. Each FCIP port supports
a single instance of the WAN tool-embedded client running in only sender or receiver mode. You
can, however, use multiple CLI sessions to invoke simultaneous ipperf sessions on different FCIP
ports.
Ipperf sessions use different TCP ports than FCIP tunnels, so you can simultaneously run an ipperf
session between a pair of ports while an FCIP tunnel is online. You can, for example, revalidate the
service provider Service Level Agreement (SLA) without bringing the FCIP tunnel down, but the
general recommendation is to run ipperf only when there are no active tunnels on the IP network.
Data transferred across an active FCIP tunnel competes for the same network bandwidth as the
ipperf session, and ipperf is attempting to saturate a network to determine how much usable
bandwidth is available between the sites. Unless you have a method to quiesce all storage traffic
over an active FCIP tunnel during ipperf testing, you may experience undesirable interactions.
Allocation of the FCIP GbE port bandwidth behaves exactly the same for ipperf as for FCIP tunnels.
If bandwidth is allocated for FCIP tunnels, the ipperf session uses the remaining bandwidth. Since
bandwidth is already reserved for the FCIP tunnels, the ipperf session is not affected by any active
FCIP tunnel. If no bandwidth is reserved, the ipperf session competes for a share of the
uncommitted bandwidth. Starting an ipperf session has an impact on any active uncommitted
bandwidth FCIP tunnels just like adding a new FCIP tunnel would. For example:
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The CLI and configuration system ensures that any bandwidth allocation does not result in an over
commitment of the FCIP GbE port. An active FCIP tunnel cannot be forced to give up its committed
buffer and bandwidth resources. Therefore, to commit a specific bandwidth to the ipperf session,
you must have an equivalent amount of spare capacity on the FCIP GbE port.
Fabric OS FCIP Administrator's Guide
53-1001766-01
Adding a committed-rate ipperf session reduces the total uncommitted bandwidth shared by
all the uncommitted bandwidth FCIP tunnels.
Adding an uncommitted-bandwidth ipperf session adds another flow competing for the shared
uncommitted bandwidth.
WAN performance analysis tools
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