Isolated Network Environment

[Fatih Berkay Sarpkaya]

Dear FABRIC Team,

I am looking to create an isolated 3-node network environment, ideally with all nodes located at the same site. To ensure the setup is as isolated as possible, what would be the best way to confirm that there is no interference or background network traffic generated by other users on the hosts I reserve?

I think that even if I place my 3 nodes on separate hosts, other users might still be running experiments that generate traffic, potentially affecting hardware performance. Do you have any recommendations on how to minimize this kind of interference? (aside from reserving the entire host, if available)

Thank you for your assistance.

Best regards,

Fatih Berkay Sarpkaya

[Komal Thareja]

Dear Fatih,

Thank you for reaching out.

At present, there is no way to prevent other users from having VMs on the same physical host unless you are able to reserve the entire host (when host doesn’t have other allocations). However, one option you may consider is requesting SmartNIC-based resources (such as CX6 or CX5). When you reserve a SmartNIC, the NIC is dedicated exclusively to your slice, ensuring that only your experiment’s traffic passes through that NIC. While this does not isolate CPU or memory resources on the host, it can minimize potential interference on the data plane network traffic.

Please let us know if you would like assistance with requesting such resources or if you have any further questions.

Best regards,
Komal Thareja

[Komal Thareja]

As a quick follow-up:

In addition to SmartNIC reservations, FABRIC also supports CPU pinning and NUMA tuning options, which can help further minimize resource contention on shared hosts. While these do not fully isolate you from other users on the physical host, they can significantly reduce interference for CPU and memory-bound workloads.

You can find working examples demonstrating how to request CPU pinning and NUMA-optimized resources in the FABRIC Jupyter notebook examples repository:

• Optimized iPerf3 Experiment with SmartNIC and CPU Pinning

• Optimized iPerf3 Experiment with CPU Pinning and NUMA Tuning (without SmartNIC)

These examples show how you can specify pinned CPUs and memory placement via FABlib when creating your slice.

Please feel free to reach out if you’d like any assistance setting this up.

Best,

Komal

[Author]

Posts