New Equinix Metal server type "n3.xlarge"

[vielmetti]

Equinix Metal has released a new server type, n3.xlarge.x86, with quad 25G NICs. You can find details at

https://metal.equinix.com/product/servers/n3-xlarge/

As discussed on the call of 2022-06-02 some interest in having the CNF testbed provide support for these systems. Of particular interest might be the following questions:

• Equinix Metal guidelines for using quad-NIC systems, including any configuration related to Hybrid bonded mode which allows both Layer 2 and Layer 3 operations on a NIC pair.
• Operating system support; current support is for Ubuntu 20 and Ubuntu 22 and for VMware ESXi 7.0, checking on a roadmap for other OS support for these
• Details about the NICs in actual use, including any special configuration or virtualization like SR-IOV if needed
• Any guidelines for tagging high-capacity NICs or high speed server interfaces inside Kubernetes, so that a scheduler could put workloads on those systems preferentially

thanks

Ed
Very interested in the CNF Testbed getting some test access to these systems. You can see availabilty through our new capacity dashboard at https://metal.equinix.com/developers/capacity-dashboard/ - please provision in a "high capacity" area for testing.