Practical advice for network performance design
Before exerting a lot of time and energy on tuning your network design, consider the demands of your workload. Most of these technologies are designed to reduce the load that networking places upon your systems' CPUs. It takes a fair number of gigabit adapters to carry enough traffic to strain most modern systems. Many networking loads are light enough so any performance gains will be as minimal as to be effectively non-existent. Keep this in mind especially on Internet-facing systems; you probably have a comparatively small Internet pipe that won't be able to stress your networking fabric. Connections to storage are also commonly over-optimized; there is little value in tuning a network connection that is already substantially faster than the underlying storage.
Set up jumbo frames on connections to storage (as long as the hardware manufacturer supports it), and for internal cluster networks. Create your virtual switches with your preferred...
