eG Monitoring
 

Measures reported by CtxSDXXenSSLCorTest

The term ‘SSL Core / Chip’ is used to represent an assignment in hardware of a number of Cavium cores. The SDX appliance uses these Cavium cores to accelerate SSL traffic in hardware. Each VPX instance on a NetScaler SDX instance is assigned one/more SSL cores/chips at the time of configuration. If one/more instances over-utilize the SSL chips, other instances may not have enough SSL chips for processing their SSL traffic. This can cause a significant delay in SSL processing on the VPX instances. This is where the CtxSDXXenSSLCorTest test helps! This test monitors and reports the SSL core usage on the SDX appliance and warns administrators of a potential contention for SSL cores/chips. Administrators are thus enabled to promptly initiate measures for averting the contention and the resulting slowness.

Outputs of the test : One set of results for the target NetScaler SDX.

Measurement Description Measurement Unit Interpretation
Ssl_cores_total Indicates the total number of SSL cores/chips on the SDX appliance. Number  
Ssl_cores_free Indicates the number of SSL cores/chips that are unused. Number A high value is desired for this measure.
Ssl_cores_used Indicates the number of SSL cores/chips that are in use. Number A low value is desired for this measure.
Ssl_cores_usage Indicates the percentage of SSL cores/chips that are utilized. Percent A value close to 100% for this measure could indicate that one/more VPX instances are hogging the SSL cores/chips. You may want to allocate more SSL cores/chips to such instances, so as to avert a potential resource contention.

When allocating SSL cores to an instance, remember that memory and SSL cores are interlinked. This means that when assigning each SSL core it will be necessary to assign 1Gb of memory per core.