Issue 11
© Solarflare Communications 2014
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Solarflare Server Adapter
User Guide
• Optionally, allocate and hot-plug a new VF into the guest at the destination machine (the plugin
loads, automatically registers with the virtio driver and the networking path uses the
accelerated path).
Benefits of Solarflare's SR-IOV solution
•
Maximum performance
. Using SR-IOV reduces CPU utilization, increases bandwidth and lowers
latency. Performance returns to near native (non-virtualized) levels.
•
Full support of migration
. Ability to migrate VMs accelerated with the SR-IOV solution - either
to a machine also supporting the same SR-IOV solution or to a KVM machine with a non-
Solarflare adapter.
•
Large number of VFs
. Solarflare adapters support 127 VFs per port - far more than other SR-IOV
capable adapters. This allows up to 127 VMs per 10G port to be accelerated per host.
•
RSS support in guest VMs
. Solarflare adapters support up to 1024 vNICs per port. Multiple
vNICs can be exposed through a single VF to a guest VM. This allows a guest VM to have multiple
transmit and receive queues. The Solarflare plugin model fully supports intelligently spreading
network traffic over multiple queues to scale performance over the available CPUs. This is
termed receive side scaling (RSS) and is typically used in non-virtualized environments (Linux/
Windows) to improve network performance. With the Solarflare plugin model when VMs are
deployed to run on multiple (virtual) CPUs, each CPU can be given a dedicated transmit and
receive queue so that network performance scales over the available CPU cores.
7.3 Installation
Platform support
To use SR-IOV, platform support for hardware virtualization must be enabled. Refer to
for more information. Take care to enable VT-d as well as VT on an Intel
platform. To verify that the extensions have been correctly enabled refer to
On an Intel platform, the IOMMU must be explicitly enabled by appending
intel_iommu=on
to the
kernel line in the
/boot/grub/grub.conf
file. Refer to
for more information.
AMD systems only require that the IOMMU is enabled in the BIOS. The system is ready for PCI
passthrough once the IOMMU is enabled.
Step 1: Download and install host drivers
Download the Solarflare Linux drivers from
• For RHEL 6.0, 6.1 - part number SF-100785-LS (minimum version 3.1.0.4088).
• For RHEL 6.2 - part number SF-103848-LS (minimum version 3.2.1.6090).