Are the HP CN1000E good cards for 10GbE networking?

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BLinux

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I know these are CNA cards, but can they be used just for 10GbE network cards with native Linux support? Or, is it required to use the HP drivers? From the description, sounds like they might just be Emulex adapters?

HPE Support document - HPE Support Center

Do they perform well? They seem to be cheap on eBay...
 

Evan

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Old, and probably power hungry but I am sure they perform well. See the supported OS, drivers may be fun.
 

BLinux

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Old, and probably power hungry but I am sure they perform well. See the supported OS, drivers may be fun.
old, but that's about as old as the Mellanox ConnectX-2 cards that everyone around here seems to like for cheap 10GbE?
 

Evan

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old, but that's about as old as the Mellanox ConnectX-2 cards that everyone around here seems to like for cheap 10GbE?
But connectX-2 have better modern OS driver support from what I see. Don't really know just saying heads up on drivers
 

sentania

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I have 8 of these in ESX hosts. They work just fine, and provide more throughput than I ever got out of a set of ConnectX-2 cards.

No idea on the power consumption, but probably horrendous.
 
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BLinux

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I have 8 of these in ESX hosts. They work just fine, and provide more throughput than I ever got out of a set of ConnectX-2 cards.

No idea on the power consumption, but probably horrendous.
so you're saying they perform better than the ConnectX-2 cards? by what margin?
 

BLinux

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I perf tests in a centos 6 vm would usually top out at 5-6 gbps on the X2. With the Cn1000e, I usually get 8-9
that's not quite my experience, at least not with CentOS 7 and iperf3. I just tested a bunch of single and dual port ConnectX-2 cards using SFP+ fiber tranceivers and 8.9-9.4 Gbps.
 

sentania

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that's not quite my experience, at least not with CentOS 7 and iperf3. I just tested a bunch of single and dual port ConnectX-2 cards using SFP+ fiber tranceivers and 8.9-9.4 Gbps.
Interesting. Unfortunately, I gifted the X2s to a friend so I can't do deeper testing to make sure it wasn't something environmental
 

saivert

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5.6Gbps sometimes happens when running test from a Windows machine. I never had issues with Linux to Linux testing.
Seems like the networking stack on Windows is finicky with these ConnectX 2 cards. There are several other threads about this problem on here. I eventually managed to get the right transfer speeds by testing SMB file copying.

iPerf might also have different default settings on the Windows version. I got better performance by manually setting the window size. Also recommended to use iPerf 2 for Windows systems.