EANTC Test Report: Huawei 4T Line Processing Unit

1 EANTC Test Report: Huawei 4T Line Processing Unit Page 2 of 12 About EANTCEANTC (European AdvancedNetworking Test Center) isinternationally recognized asone of the world's leadingindependent test centers fortelecommunication in Berlin, the companyoffers vendor-neutral consultancyand realistic, reproducible high-quality testing servicessince 1991. Customers include leading networkequipment manufacturers, tier 1 service providers,large enterprises and governments 's Proof of Concept, acceptance tests andnetwork audits cover established and next-generationfixed and mobile network of ContentsIntroduction.

2 2 Test Highlights .. 2 Executive 3 Tested Devices and Equipment .. 3 Test Results: Performance .. 4 Test Results: Power 5 Test Results: Scalability .. 6 FIB Scalability .. 6 BGP Route 7 Test Results: Functionality .. 7 Virtual System Separation .. 7 Equal Cost Multi-Path (ECMP) Load Balancing .. 8 Ethernet VPN (EVPN).. 8 EVPN with MPLS/SR Transport .. 9 EVPN with VXLAN 9 Next Generation Multicast VPN (NG-MVPN).. 9 Conclusion .. 10 IntroductionHuawei Technologies commissioned EANTC to verifythe functionality and performance of its new 4T LineProcessing Unit (LPU) for Huawei s NE9000 SeriesRouters.

3 The 4T LPU is powered by Huawei s in-housedesigned fourth-generation Solar NetworkProcessing (NP) chipset which Huawei designed tosupport 1 Terabit/second full-duplex forwardingcapacity. The card houses 40 (forty) 100 Gigabit-Ethernet (100 GbE) interfaces. As the name 4T indicates, the line card aims atproviding four (4) Terabit/second throughput in asingle Huawei NE9000 slot. The goal is indeedimpressive and is likely to be a welcome upgrade toservice providers especially those that already havethe NE9000 installed in their network, and arerunning out of ran a range of tests on the network card, withparticular focus on cloud data center and serviceprovider infrastructure use cases.

4 Our test initiallycorroborated the functional aspects of the networkcard, followed by measuring the data planeforwarding performance, control plane scalability andfinally the power HighlightsThroughput Line rate (4 Tbit/s) IP forwarding performance with IMIX packet distribution and uniform packet sizes of 256 bytes or largerPowerEfficiency Watt per Gbit/s weighted energy consumption rate per 4T LPUS calability BGP scalability up to 80 Million IPv4 routes, or simultaneously 40 Million IPv4 FIB scalability up to Million IPv4 and Million IPv6 routesFunctionality Full system virtualization support with Huawei s Virtual Systems feature Ethernet VPN (EVPN) functionality with both Segment Routing and MPLS, and VXLAN encapsulation Next Generation Multicast VPN (NG MVPN)

5 SupportEANTC Test Report: Huawei 4T Line Processing Unit Page 3 of 12 Executive SummaryHuawei set the bar high with its new 4T LineProcessing Unit (LPU), by providing a 4 Tbit/s per slotfull-duplex forwarding performance and a theoreticalmaximum 80 Tbit/s full-duplex forwarding capacity ina single NE9000-20 core router features we tested functioned asexpected and as Huawei found that the new LPU is not only suitable for IPcore application; it is also a good fit for provider edgeand Internet peering scenarios, metro aggregation aswell as data center gateways due to its largeforwarding and routing (FIB and RIB) scale and itssupport for EVPN, segment routing, MPLS, VXLAN andNG-MVPN Devices and EquipmentEANTC tested the 4T LPU line card installed on anHuawei NE9000 Converged Backbone on the test case, one, two or three LPUwere installed in a single Huawei NE9000-20 tested configuration for thefirst device under test (DUT1)

6 Included 8 SwitchedFabric Units (SFU) and 2 Main Processing Unit (MPU).The implementation could support up to 20 LPUs. Thechosen SFU redundancy model was 7+1 (seven activeunits plus one standby unit), and the MPUs worked inactive/standby the performance, scalability and powerconsumption test cases, we used the Huawei NE9000-20 router directly connected with test equipment whilein the functionality tests, we deployed a networktopology using Huawei NE9000-20(DUT1), twoHuawei NE9000-8 (DUT2 and DUT3), all three routersare with 4T LPU Line cards installed, one additionalHuawei NE40E customer edge router and emulatedcustomer edge routers as shown in Figure 1.

7 Huawei claims that the NE9000-20 and NE9000-8routers are programmed with the same scope offunctionalities, but designed with different chassissizes, forwarding capacities and power consumptionetc. All core routers were tested with Huawei VersatileRouting Platform VRP (R) software version ,while the NE40E customer edge router was runningHuawei Versatile Routing Platform VRP (R) softwareversion Single-mode QSFP28 transceiverswere used in all Ixia XGS12 traffic generator was used with fourLava AP40/100 GbE-2P shown in the table below, EANTC defined aparticular IPv4 and IPv6 traffic mix ( IMIX ) with arange of packet sizes to ensure a realistic IP trafficload in the core 1.

8 IMIX Traffic DefinitionNE9000-204T LPUNE9000-8 Frame Size (Bytes)WeightPercent of Packets (%)64 (IPv4) or 78(IPv6)35100264137361057058130061015181 625900012 EANTC Test Report: Huawei 4T Line Processing Unit Page 4 of 12 Figure 1: Overall Test TopologyTest Results: PerformanceThe goal of the test was to measure the forwardingperformance of the new line card. We tested IP/MPLS forwarding performance with two 4T LPUs as shown inFigure a total of 80 tester ports were required, we useda snake configuration between LPU 1 and 2 using asingle-mode fiber patch cord.

9 Huawei s engineersadditionally configured 40 VRFs between LPUsinterfaces. This setup allowed us to test the 4 Tbit/sforwarding capacity of the line card, using a100 Gbit/s data rate between two test generator portsTG1 and performed two series of test runs. In the first serieswe sent IPv4-only test traffic. Per Huawei s request, wesent the traffic with 100 IPv4 prefixes per VRF,resulting in a total of 4,000 prefixes. In the second run we sent a mix of IPv4 and IPv6 trafficwith a 80:20 ratio and 100 IPv4 plus 100 IPv6prefixes per VRF, resulting in a total of 8,000 service type was L3 VPN as defined in RFC requested to select 256 byte-sized packets asthe smallest size for both IPv4 only and IPv4/IPv6 mixtraffic test runs.

10 Additionally, we performed test runsusing uniform frame sizes of 512, 1024, 1518 and9000 bytes. In addition, we conducted one more testrun with IMIX frame sizes as specified in table 2: Test Setup Forwarding PerformanceFor each frame size, we sent full line rate ofbidirectional traffic for the duration of 600 4T LPU forwarded the traffic with zero packet lossin each SR LSP/IP100 GbE LinkTraffic GeneratorMVPN/EVPNPIM-SSMIGMPv3eBGPA utonomous SystemLink Aggregation/GroupAccess DomainMPLS/SR Network100 GbE link40x100 GbE line cardTraffic GeneratorVRFS tatic Route(NE9000-20) Test Report.