I’m a networking enthusiast looking to mess around with some of the toys the professional world has to offer. Only dealing with a home network and just threw down on new 8-core and 16-core AMD X570 chipset builds. Both machines are equipped with PCI Express 4.0 boards and the latest M.2 SSDs which write at around 4400 MB / sec max (approx 35 Gbps if my math is right).
I’m wanting to use the 40-Gigabit MCX4131A-BCAT ConnectX-4 Lx EN network card (or perhaps the 50-Gigabit version) in both machines but needing to know everything I will need to hit the full potential speeds of my drives before I bomb $1,400 on this killer solution.
I have seen a Linus Tech Tips video https://youtu.be/NAks6qM9jlM?t=373 in which he states that his tests were significantly bottle-necked due to not having RMDA. Does anyone know if I can get RDMA / RoCE to run on my two Windows 10 Pro machines?
Thank you for posting you inquiry on the Mellanox Community.
Based in on the information provided, the video you shared is based on old ConnectX-2 Infiniband adapter which is a different network technology.
Good news, the adapter you are revering to (ConnectX-4 Lx) is RDMA capable even on Ethernet technology. This is called RoCE, RDMA over Converged Ethernet. Basically gives you all the RDMA capabilities as on Infiniband.
Even on our ConnectX-3 Ethernet adapters, RoCE is available.
One catch, even though our adapters are RDMA capable and show up in the OS as such, the OS needs to support it as well. The basic version of Windows 10 Pro is not RDMA capable, you need to upgrade to the Windows 10 Pro Workstation or Enterprise Edition.
By default all Windows server Editions (2012R2, 2016 and 2019) are RDMA capable by default.