The Dell EMC Ready Architecture for Red Hat OpenStack Platform 16.1-Flex provides the ability to enable SR-IOV support based on 2 ports and/or 4 ports on the compute nodes at the core or the edge site(s) in the solution.
Single root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV) is an extension to the PCI Express (PCIe) specification. SR-IOV enables a single PCIe device to appear as multiple, separate virtual devices. Traditionally in a virtualized environment, a packet has to go through an extra layer of the hypervisor, that results in multiple CPU interrupts per packet. These extra interrupts cause a bottleneck in high traffic environments. SR-IOV enabled devices have the ability to dedicate isolated access to its resources among various PCIe hardware functions. These functions are later assigned to the virtual machines which allow direct memory access (DMA) to the network data.
By default, SR-IOV is not enabled in the Dell EMC PowerEdge R-Series system BIOS. When SR-IOV is deployed, virtual functions are not created on the NIC interfaces.
Use the following steps to set the virtualization mode to SR-IOV and VF count to 64 in the Dell EMC PowerEdge R-Series system BIOS device settings for Mellanox NICs:
- Enter system BIOS during boot by selecting F2.
- Select
Device Settings
. - Select the Network Interface Card.
Note: SR-IOV has been validated with Mellanox ConnectX-5 / Intel XXV 710 NICs. Below is an example of SR-IOV configuration with Mellanox NIC.
- Select the
Device Level Configuration
option. - Change the virtualization mode from None to SR-IOV and the
PCI Virtual Functions Advertised
from the default setting eight to the desired value.Note: Dell EMC has tested with a value of 64.
-
Repeat steps three through five for each Mellanox ConnectX-5 100GbE adapter where SR-IOV will be
enabled.
- Save BIOS settings and reboot the system.
Note: SR-IOV can be enabled for both Mellanox ConnectX-5 and Intel XXV 710 NICs by the JetPack version 16.1-Flex automation toolkit.