Sr-iov

[33_viper_33]

So, lets talk SR-IOV. I was just reading up on it and think I understand based on the following article: What is SR-IOV? - blog.scottlowe.org - The weblog of an IT pro specializing in virtualization, storage, and servers

My main question is, how this is useful in a pfsense environment as mentioned in the following post: http://forums.servethehome.com/networking/2389-good-pfsense-2.html#post22058.

How do you pass through the WAN NIC using SR-IOV in ESXi? How do you see and setup the virtual functions? What are the advantages of SR-IOV vs VT-d pass through focusing on a vMotion environment? Can ESXI pass this information to a separate host in the vMotion environment or does it still require VLANs and a switch? Lastly, are the C6100 on-board NICs compatible?

I would be interested in it if a dedicated port on a NIC for WAN can be utilized and pass that information to the second host on the network for load balancing. Shutdown the the extra host and have the router jump back to host 1. This would allow a low-power always on server to host some of the critical tasks and have a secondary server standing by to load balance when traffic increases.

 

[zer0sum]

One of the main benefits is that there is a huge performance boost when using SRIOV.

With a host operating system like pfsense you can get 10Gbps line speed to the VM as it is seeing the physical hardware instead of a vswitch.
Depending on the NIC you get a certain amount of VF's, so with a single 10Gbps card you could share that to say 7 VM's.
The VF's act like a switch as well, so inter-VM traffic doesn't even have to leave the box if you dont need it to.

The Intel NIC's that support SRIOV are all listed here
Essentially you want an 82576, 82599, i350 or x540 series, although the 82576 does not work with Vmware with SRIOV as far as I can work out.

To get SRIOV functionality working you will need an Intel NIC that supports it and then you will need a motherboard with a bios that will assign PCI space to the VF's. Not all motherboards have this functionality and you should check if it is supported. Something like the Supermicro X9SCL is supposed to work and is a relatively cheap option. The onboard NIC's won't be SRIOV but you can just get an 82599 or i350 and you should be good to go.

Check this VMware KB article for more info

If you want to make life easier look into using KVM instead as well

 

[zer0sum]

This KB from intel is also spot on - How to Configure SR-IOV VFs in a VMware ESXi* Environment

 

[33_viper_33]

Thank you both! Will read through them and play if the C6100 supports it. May do a quick how-to on this forum since there doesn't seem to be any info at the moment.