Sr-Iov; Overview; Enabling Sr-Iov - Qlogic FastLinQ 3400 Series User Manual

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SR-IOV

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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:
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To enable SR-IOV:
1.
Overview
Enabling SR-IOV
The adapter hardware supports SR-IOV.
SR-IOV is supported and enabled in the system BIOS.
Enable the feature on the adapter:
Using the QCC GUI:
a. Select the network adapter. 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).
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