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SR-IOV
Overview
Virtualization of network controllers allows users to consolidate their networking
hardware resources and run multiple virtual machines concurrently on
consolidated hardware. Virtualization also provides the user a rich set of features
such as I/O sharing, consolidation, isolation and migration, and simplified
management with provisions for teaming and failover.
Virtualization can come at the cost of reduced performance due to hypervisor
overhead. The PCI-SIG introduced the Single- Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV)
specification to address these performance issues by creating a virtual function
(VF), a lightweight PCIe function that can be directly assigned to a virtual machine
(VM), bypassing the hypervisor layer for the main data movement.
Not all QLogic adapters support SR-IOV; refer to your product documentation for
details.
Enabling SR-IOV
Before attempting to enable SR-IOV, ensure that:
The adapter hardware supports SR-IOV.
SR-IOV is supported and enabled in the system BIOS.
To enable SR-IOV:
1.
Enable the feature on the adapter:
If using QCS:
a.
Select the network adapter in the
Explorer View
pane. Select the
Configuration
tab and select
SR-IOV Global Enable
.
b.
In the
SR-IOV VFs per PF
field, configure the number of SRIOV Virtual
Functions (VFs) that the adapter can support per physical function,
from 0 to 64 in increments of 8 (default = 16).
Summary of Contents for 8400 Series
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