Accelerated Networking in Azure

Azure Accelerated Networking is network throughput performance improvement feature provided by a Microsoft for Azure Linux & Windows Azure VM’s. This feature enables a high-performance path and bypasses the host from the datapath, reducing latency and CPU utilisation, for use with the most demanding network workloads on supported VM types

Without accelerated networking, all networking traffic in and out of the VM must traverse the host and the virtual switch.  For the best results, it is ideal to enable this feature on at least two VM’s connected to the same Azure Virtual Network. When communicating across VNets or connecting on-premises, this feature has minimal impact to overall latency.

Some of the Limitations & Constraints explained here and a list of list of supported VM instances here.

How do we test this feature for Azure Windows VM’s?

For the scope of this post the below are the parameters that will be tested with in the same virtual network using Standard D3 v2 (4 vcpus, 14 GiB memory) Azure VM’s .

1. VM-VM Network performance throughput test – using iperf 
2. Install Linux on both VM’s following a detailed steps here
3. Install qperf
4. VM-VM latency Test – using qperf

Before starting the above tests i have deployed the VM’s using below Azure CLI script in my Github repository here excluding the last 2 lines of code(so that we capture the results of latency tests and network performance test before enabling Accelerated networking).

Next few steps would involve you to download a few tools and deploy them on both the Azure VM’s. For the scope of the testing here i have considered below assumptions for latency and performance tests.

• test-vm1 will act as a client
• test-vm2 will be used for server communication

How to disable Accelerated Networking on your NIC??

Run the below Azure CLI commands

VM-VM Network performance Testing:

         Without Accelerated Networking                          With Accelerated Networking

From the result, we can see D3 V2 VM egress throughput is ~2.82 Gbps with accelerated networking enabled while its ~2.01 Gbps with out the feature enabled.

VM-VM latency Test:

        Without Accelerated Networking                          With Accelerated Networking

From the result, we can see D3 V2 VM Network latency is ~72.9 microseconds. with accelerated networking enabled while its ~156.5 microseconds with out the feature enabled

High level charting to show that enabling accelerated networking for VM’s improves the overall network throughput and bandwidth

Data validated without Accelerated Networking

Data validated with Accelerated Networking