Storage Foundation for Oracle® RAC 7.4.1 Administrator's Guide - Linux

How LLT supports RDMA capability for faster interconnects between applications

LLT and GAB support fast interconnect between applications using RDMA technology over InfiniBand and Ethernet media (RoCE). To leverage the RDMA capabilities of the hardware and also support the existing LLT functionalities, LLT maintains two channels (RDMA and non-RDMA) for each of the configured RDMA links. Both RDMA and non-RDMA channels are capable of transferring data between the nodes and LLT provides separate APIs to their clients, such as, CFS, CVM, to use these channels. The RDMA channel provides faster data transfer by leveraging the RDMA capabilities of the hardware. The RDMA channel is mainly used for data-transfer when the client is capable to use this channel. The non-RDMA channel is created over the UDP layer and LLT uses this channel mainly for sending and receiving heartbeats. Based on the health of the non-RDMA channel, GAB decides cluster membership for the cluster. The connection management of the RDMA channel is separate from the non-RDMA channel, but the connect and disconnect operations for the RDMA channel are triggered based on the status of the non-RDMA channel

If the non-RDMA channel is up but due to some issues in RDMA layer the RDMA channel is down, in such cases the data-transfer happens over the non-RDMA channel with a lesser performance until the RDMA channel is fixed. The system logs displays the message when the RDMA channel is up or down.

LLT uses the Open Fabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED) layer and the drivers installed by the operating system to communicate with the hardware. LLT over RDMA allows applications running on one node to directly access the memory of an application running on another node that are connected over an RDMA-enabled network. In contrast, on nodes connected over a non-RDMA network, applications cannot directly read or write to an application running on another node. LLT clients such as, CFS and CVM, have to create intermediate copies of data before completing the read or write operation on the application, which increases the latency period and affects performance in some cases.

LLT over an RDMA network enables applications to read or write to applications on another node over the network without the need to create intermediate copies. This leads to low latency, higher throughput, and minimized CPU host usage thus improving application performance. Cluster volume manager and Cluster File Systems, which are clients of LLT and GAB, can use LLT over RDMA capability for specific use cases.