Assistance with 100Gb load testing on a PA-5450

[rolinger]

We have a spirent connected directly to a PA-5450 to do load testing on the 100Gb ports.  The PA5400 has two NC cards (Slot 1 & 2) and then 4 DPC cards (slot 3-6).  The docs show that NC1 is logically mapped to DPC3, and NC2 is mapped to DPC4.  But there is virtually no mention of slots 5 and 6.  Are they auto assigned or do we have to manually map them to NC1 vs NC2?  Any insights on Slots 5 and 6 is appreciated.

Spirent Port 1 <-- 100Gb --> FW eth1/25 (Trust Zone)

Spirent Port 2 <-- 100Gb --> Fw eth2/26 (Untrust Zone).

QSFP28-CWDM4 optics being used

There is a single bi-directional policy SRC: trust/untrust  Dst: trust/untrust - with any/any/any across the board, no threat/virus/security applied to the policy, just straight throughput traffic at the moment.

At the moment we are only able to get 53Gb of stateful connections through the FW during load testing.  Are there any other FW configurations I need to be aware of or should consider to get the loads up to the 100Gb capacity?  Or any specifics we need to tweak in the test itself?  

[Brandon_Wertz]

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@rolinger wrote:

We have a spirent connected directly to a PA-5450 to do load testing on the 100Gb ports.  The PA5400 has two NC cards (Slot 1 & 2) and then 4 DPC cards (slot 3-6).  The docs show that NC1 is logically mapped to DPC3, and NC2 is mapped to DPC4.  But there is virtually no mention of slots 5 and 6.  Are they auto assigned or do we have to manually map them to NC1 vs NC2?  Any insights on Slots 5 and 6 is appreciated.

Spirent Port 1 <-- 100Gb --> FW eth1/25 (Trust Zone)

Spirent Port 2 <-- 100Gb --> Fw eth2/26 (Untrust Zone).

QSFP28-CWDM4 optics being used

There is a single bi-directional policy SRC: trust/untrust  Dst: trust/untrust - with any/any/any across the board, no threat/virus/security applied to the policy, just straight throughput traffic at the moment.

At the moment we are only able to get 53Gb of stateful connections through the FW during load testing.  Are there any other FW configurations I need to be aware of or should consider to get the loads up to the 100Gb capacity?  Or any specifics we need to tweak in the test itself?  

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I don't have anything specific to point out to help get you to a better throughput, only to point out you might want to consider the type of data you're pushing through the box and also turn off DSRI to help create better throughput.  I would think you'd get a better throughput rate with UDP vice TCP also packet size of the traffic will also impact throughput performance.  

It's probably going to be in your best interest to reach out to your account SE and walk through this with them as they'll be the best resource to work with you on what you're trying to accomplish.