General Requirements

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The BQN uses dedicated commercial off-the-shelf servers or virtual machines, configured according to the network capacity and connectivity requirements.

Supported CPUs

Intel Xeon CPUs (Nehalem or later)
AMD Epyc CPUs

Dual-CPU servers are supported. Following normal NUMA requirements, RAM must be balanced between the two CPUs (for example, 16GB + 16 GB).

Currently, the server maximum number of CPU cores supported is 128.

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Supported Hard Disks

SSDs (Solid State Drive) are recommended for performance and reliability reasons.

The following disk types are supported:

SATA
SAS
NMVe
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Supported Network Interfaces

A BQN server needs at least three network ports: one for management and another two for packet processing.

Ports for packet processing should be Intel-based, with one of the following controllers:

1 Gbps

Intel I210
Intel I350

10 Gbps

Intel X520
Intel X540
Intel X550
Intel X553
Intel X710
Intel XL710

25 Gbps

Intel XXV710
Intel E810

40 Gbps

Intel XL710

100 Gbps

Intel E810

Other network interface models can be supported but with much lower throughput capacity (up to 1Gbps).
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Supported Network Interface Transceivers

For optical interfaces, the transceivers must be Intel-compatible of one of the following types:

1G SFP

1000BASE-SX
1000BASE-LX

10G SFP+

10GBASE-SR/1000BASE-SX
10GBASE-LR/1000BASE-LX

25G SFP28

40G QSFP+

40GBASE-SR4
40GBASE-LR4

100G QSFP28

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Hardware Dimensioning

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The minimum configuration is for 1Gbps, going up to 150Gbps. The following table summarizes the CPU, RAM and disk needed depending on the network capacity. The processors shown are examples of verified systems. Processors with similar performance characteristics will also work

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	CPU	RAM	Disk
1 Gbps	i5/i7/E3-1220/Atom C3558	8 GB	60 GB
10 Gbps	E3-1240/E-2334	32 GB	120 GB
20 Gbps	Xeon 4214	64 GB	240 GB
40 Gbps	2xXeon E4214	128 GB	240 GB
100 Gbps	2xAMD 7532 Rome	256 GB	480 GB
150 Gbps	2xAMD 75F3 Milan	512 GB	480 GB

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Virtual Platforms

BQN supports:

VMware
KVM (with Linux kernel of the host machine of v 4.11 or later and QEMU of version 2.9 or later).

All resources will be fully dedicated (pinned) to the virtual machine (no oversubscription). Depending on the traffic load, check with Bequant the required resources needed. As a general guideline, use the following resources:

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	vCPU*	RAM	Disk
1 Gbps	2	8 GB	60 GB
10 Gbps	14	32 GB	120 GB

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* Each vCPU is equivalent to one core of an Intel XeonE5-2630 v4 @ 2.20GHz CPUs, with hyperthreading enabled.

For the data plane interfaces, the supported configurationis using Intel network cards with PCI passthrough, because of performance and reliability reasons.

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