Hello all,
I have been trying to make decisions on CPUs, motherboards, NICs, and so on. This is primarily for building my own Sophos UTM (either virtualized or physical) @ 1Gb/s, but also a home lab to play around with interesting technology.
One of the one's I would love to play with is SR-IOV. But, after combing through forums and other posts here and elsewhere, I don't think it is possible, or at least not practical.
Here is what you apparently need for SR-IOV:
- A motherboard with BIOS support, firmware, etc.
- A NIC with support - something like the Intel i350*
- *BUT, in most cases it seems it was not meant for 1Gig, really only 10Gig
- A CPU with support - as in only certain Xeons, not consumer chips, not even E3's maybe
- OS with support (VMWare, Hyper-V, etc.)
- And, in the case of VMWare, the free ESXi 6u1 won't cut it, you need Enterprise Plus ($5K+ or so)
- Even then, the i350 does not appear on the VMware HCL for the SR-IOV feature
- Drivers with support
So, if you have all of that, and probably all the planets aligned just so, you can get it to work. Seems to me you would have to have an awfully strong use case for it to be worth the effort. I just wanted it to make it easier to do multiple things with one home lab server, and better performance for Sophos UTM.
I have not seen any article about anyone getting it to work with anything near things I would want to pay for in a home lab, and even if what I needed fell off a truck, it would be too loud and use too much power.
Sound about right?
So, my other two options are to just passthrough the whole NIC to the VM, or run bare metal. So far I am not seeing too many examples of people passing through individual NICs from say the 4-ports on an i350, I see some hints that it can be done, but I have not seen a confirmed case with screenshots. So, I would probably have to use a couple 1 or 2 port NICs.
I just thought I would post this rant to see if anyone disagrees. Reason being, I can probably give up trying to find a combination of the above hardware to try and do SR-IOV, because it is just not going to work, or at least there is a low probability of it. So, I should just use what I have or get what I need for the latter two options.
Does anyone think otherwise?
-JCL
I have been trying to make decisions on CPUs, motherboards, NICs, and so on. This is primarily for building my own Sophos UTM (either virtualized or physical) @ 1Gb/s, but also a home lab to play around with interesting technology.
One of the one's I would love to play with is SR-IOV. But, after combing through forums and other posts here and elsewhere, I don't think it is possible, or at least not practical.
Here is what you apparently need for SR-IOV:
- A motherboard with BIOS support, firmware, etc.
- A NIC with support - something like the Intel i350*
- *BUT, in most cases it seems it was not meant for 1Gig, really only 10Gig
- A CPU with support - as in only certain Xeons, not consumer chips, not even E3's maybe
- OS with support (VMWare, Hyper-V, etc.)
- And, in the case of VMWare, the free ESXi 6u1 won't cut it, you need Enterprise Plus ($5K+ or so)
- Even then, the i350 does not appear on the VMware HCL for the SR-IOV feature
- Drivers with support
So, if you have all of that, and probably all the planets aligned just so, you can get it to work. Seems to me you would have to have an awfully strong use case for it to be worth the effort. I just wanted it to make it easier to do multiple things with one home lab server, and better performance for Sophos UTM.
I have not seen any article about anyone getting it to work with anything near things I would want to pay for in a home lab, and even if what I needed fell off a truck, it would be too loud and use too much power.
Sound about right?
So, my other two options are to just passthrough the whole NIC to the VM, or run bare metal. So far I am not seeing too many examples of people passing through individual NICs from say the 4-ports on an i350, I see some hints that it can be done, but I have not seen a confirmed case with screenshots. So, I would probably have to use a couple 1 or 2 port NICs.
I just thought I would post this rant to see if anyone disagrees. Reason being, I can probably give up trying to find a combination of the above hardware to try and do SR-IOV, because it is just not going to work, or at least there is a low probability of it. So, I should just use what I have or get what I need for the latter two options.
Does anyone think otherwise?
-JCL