
Issue 11
© Solarflare Communications 2014
324
Solarflare Server Adapter
User Guide
Chapter 8: SR-IOV Virtualization for XenServer
This chapter describes Solarflare’s unified approach to SR-IOV Virtualization using Xenserver
TM
6
supporting Windows and Linux guests. Solarflare SR-IOV enables accelerated cut-through
performance while maintaining full compatibility with hypervisor based services and management
tools.
• Supported Platforms and Adapters...Page 324
• XenServer6 SR-IOV...Page 325
• Performance Tuning...Page 330
8.1 Supported Platforms and Adapters
Solarflare XenServer6 SR-IOV acceleration currently supports:
• XenServer 6.0, 6.1.
• Intel platforms supporting VT-d.
• AMD platforms supporting AMD-Vi.
• Guest VM - Win2k8r2 and RHEL 6.
• All Solarflare SFN5xxx and SFN6xxx series adapters.
The hardware supports different configurations of (a) the number VFs exposed and (b) the number
of vNICs (and therefore MSI-X interrupts) to give to each VF. This can be configured with the sfboot
utility.
Currently the default configuration is 127 VFs each allocated 1 vNIC.
NOTE:
Solarflare’s hybrid SR-IOV solution is no longer supported by Citrix and is limited to
XenServer 6.0. Further, this solution is limited to supporting Windows guests and Linux guests
running RHEL 6.1 (or earlier). Attempting to use this SR-IOV solution with guest VMs running a
newer version of RHEL may expose a hypervisor bug that prevents network traffic passing.