On 12/26/2010 11:57 AM, Richard Croucher wrote:
The vNIC driver only works when you have Ethernet/InfiniBand hardware
gateways in your environment. It is useful when you have external hosts to
communicate with which do not have direct InfiniBand connectivity.
IPoIB is still heavily used in these environments to provide TCP/IP
connectivity within the InfiniBand fabric.
The primary Use Case for vNICs is probably for virtualization servers, so
that individual Guests can be presented with a virtual Ethernet NIC and do
not lead to load any InfiniBand drivers. Only the hypervisor needs to have
the InfiniBand software stack loaded.
I've also applied vNICs in the Financial Services arena, for connectivity to
external TCP/IP services but there the IPoIB gateway function is arguably
more useful.
The whole vNIC arena is complicated by different, incompatible
implementations from each of Qlogic and Mellanox.
Richard
Richard, with your explanation I understand why vNIC / EoIB is used in
the case you cite, but I don't understand why it is NOT used in the
other cases (like Ali says).
I can *guess* it's probably because with a virtual ethernet fabric you
have to do all IP stack in software, probably without even having the
stateless offloads (so it would be a performance reason). Is that the
reason?
Thank you
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