Clients (Systems That Drove the Test Load)
Eight HP Integrity rx2600 clients, each with two 1.5 GHz Intel® Itanium® 2 processors with 6 MB L3 unified cache and 2GB memory. The clients ran HP-UX 11i v2. Each client used a single Gigabit Ethernet adapter to drive the test workload on the server.
Gigabit Ethernet Adapters
The rx8620 server had four HP A7012A, PCI-X 2-port 1000Base-T Gigabit Ethernet adapters placed in highest performing PCI-X 133 MHz slots. The cards were placed in slots numbered 4 and 5 in each of the two internal I/O bays.
Each rx2600 client used one HP A6825A, PCI 1-port 1000Base-T adapter in PCI slot 4 to drive the tests. All Gigabit Ethernet cards were configured with a maximum transmission unit (MTU) size of 1500 bytes and with both transmit and receive checksum offload capabilities enabled.
NOTE The TCP Segmentation Offload (TSO) feature was disabled on all Gigabit Ethernet cards on the server. Expect better server utilization if you enable TSO.
Switch
An HP ProCurve 3400cl-24G switch connected all 1000Base-T Gigabit Ethernet ports on the server and clients. The switch firmware version was M.08.54. The server ports on the switch were trunked to form 2-, 4-, or 8-port aggregates for the tests.