How do I turn on and configure enhanced networking on my EC2 instances?

3 minute read
0

I'm running an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance, and I want to turn on enhanced networking.

Short description

Amazon EC2 instances have three different virtual network adapters: VIF, Intel 82599 VF, and Elastic Network Adapter (ENA). For the latest instance types and adapters, see Enhanced networking on Linux and Enable enhanced networking with the Intel 82599 VF interface on Windows instances.

Important:

  • If your PPS rate reached its ceiling, then you probably reached the upper limits of the virtual network interface driver. Move to enhanced networking.
  • If your throughput is near or exceeding 20 K PPS on the VIF driver, then it's a best practice to use enhanced networking.
  • Use a cluster placement group to provide the lowest latency and highest PPS network performance for your instances.
  • To reach speeds up to 10 Gbps between instances, launch your instances in a cluster placement group with the enhanced networking instance type. These instance types are placed physically close to each other. Instance types that are close to each other further reduces latency and improves transfer speeds.
  • To reach speeds up to 25 Gbps between instances, launch your instances in a cluster placement group with ENA compatible instances. Then, make sure that traffic has multiple flows between the instances.

Resolution

Linux

Follow the guide that's applicable to your instance and adapter type:

After you turn on the enhanced networking driver for your instance type, perform network or kernel tuning. The default network kernel parameters are sufficient for most workloads. However, depending on the workload, adjust your configurations to optimize the throughput.

It's a best practice to tune the kernel based on observable behavior and metrics. When possible, use your operating system or application guidance resources.

Windows

For information on enhanced networking, see Enhanced networking on Windows. The elastic network interface driver is installed on all Amazon AMIs for Windows Server 2008 R2 and newer.

For information on elastic network interfaces, see Enable enhanced networking with the Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) on Windows instances.

Related information

How can I improve networking performance on my Amazon EC2 Windows instance?

How do I benchmark network throughput between Amazon EC2 Linux instances in the same Amazon VPC?

Amazon EC2 instance types

Elastic Network Adapter – High performance network interface for Amazon EC2

Amazon EC2 instance network bandwidth

AWS OFFICIAL
AWS OFFICIALUpdated a year ago
2 Comments

Hi everyone. using ec2 instances that support ENA mean that ENA is enabled by default? in case ENA is enabled, is it possible to state that the specifc instance has a 100Gbps BW?

replied 4 months ago

Thank you for your comment. We'll review and update the Knowledge Center article as needed.

profile pictureAWS
MODERATOR
replied 4 months ago