BQN Docs

General Requirements

The BQN uses dedicated commercial off-the-shelf servers or virtual machines, configured according to the network capacity and connectivity requirements.

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Supported CPUs

• Intel Xeon and Core CPUs (Nehalem or later)
• AMD Epyc CPUs

Dual-CPU servers are supported. See the hardware dimensioning section for details.

Currently, the server maximum number of CPU cores supported is 256. It requires bqn R4.18 or more, with bqnkernel-R3.0.13 or later. For up to 128 cores, previous bqnkernel and bqn releases can be used.

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Supported Hard Disks

[.p-highlight-blue]SSDs (Solid State Drive) are recommended for performance and reliability reasons.[.p-highlight-blue]

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The following disk types are supported:

• SATA
• SAS
• NMVe

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Supported Network Interfaces

[.p-highlight-blue]A BQN server needs at least three network ports: one for management and another two for packet processing.[.p-highlight-blue]

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Ports for packet processing should be Intel-based, with one of the following controllers:

1 Gbps

• Intel I210
• Intel I350

2.5 Gbps

• Intel i226-V (requires bqnkernel-R3.0.13 or later).

10 Gbps

• Intel X520
• Intel X540
• Intel X550
• Intel X553
• Intel X710
• Intel XL710

25 Gbps

• Intel XXV710
• Intel E810

40 Gbps

• Intel XL710

100 Gbps

• Intel E810 (requires bqnkernel-R3.0.14 or later).

Other network interface models can be supported but with much lower throughput capacity (up to 1Gbps).
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Supported Network Interface Transceivers

For optical interfaces, the transceivers must be Intel-compatible of one of the following types:

1G SFP

• 1000BASE-SX
• 1000BASE-LX

10G SFP+

• 10GBASE-SR/1000BASE-SX
• 10GBASE-LR/1000BASE-LX

25G SFP28

40G QSFP+

• 40GBASE-SR4
• 40GBASE-LR4

100G QSFP28

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Hardware Dimensioning

The minimum configuration is for 1Gbps, going up to 200Gbps. The following table summarizes the CPU, RAM and disk needed depending on the network capacity. The processors shown are examples of verified systems. Processors with similar performance characteristics will also work.

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* RAM configuration requirements:

• For configurations below 10 Gbps, use 1 or 2 DIMMs.
• For a 10 Gbps configuration, use 2 DIMMs.
• For a 20 Gbps configuration, use 4 or 6 DIMMs, all of the same size. For the Xeon 4310, 8 DIMMs are also OK.
• For a 40 Gbps configuration, use 8 or 12 DIMMs, all of the same size and equally distributed between the two CPUs. For the Xeon 4310, 16 DIMMs are also OK.
• For configurations of 100 Gbps and 200 Gbps, use at least one DIMM per CPU memory channel, with equal number of DIMMs per channel.  For example, the AMD 7532 CPU has 8 memory channels, so a 100 Gbps system will use 8 DIMMs per CPU (16 DIMMs in total), each DIMM of 16 GB, to reach the required 256 GB of total RAM.

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Virtual Platforms

BQN supports:

• VMware
• KVM (with Linux kernel of the host machine of v 4.11 or later and QEMU of version 2.9 or later).

All resources will be fully dedicated (pinned) to the virtual machine (no oversubscription). Depending on the traffic load, check with Bequant the required resources needed. As a general guideline, use the following resources:

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* Each vCPU is equivalent to one core of an Intel XeonE5-2630 v4 @ 2.20GHz CPUs, with hyperthreading enabled.

For the data plane interfaces, the supported configurationis using Intel network cards with PCI passthrough, because of performance and reliability reasons.

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