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Potential Drawback Of Using SR-IOVДЄ draw back is that by bypassing the Extensible Virtual Switch you might lose some features and extensions.

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One of the benefits That Hyper-V 3.0 in Windows 8 has over the competition is that you can live migrate to an node thatвЂ™s not using SR-IOV. Now in contrast to VMQ & RSS that donвЂ™t mix together in a Hyper-V environment you can combine SR-IOV with RSS, they work together. Dynamic VMQ is supposed to take care of that black art and make it more reliable and easier.

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Especially when NIC teaming and some NIC advanced software issues come in to play. But as we discussed already this functionality is highly under documented and itвЂ™s a bit of black art. VMQ Coalescing tried to address some of the pain of the next bottle neck of using VMQ, which is the large number of interrupts needed to handle traffic if you have a lot of queues. To see a nice explanation of SR-IOV take a look at the Intel SR-IOV Explanation video on YouTube. So with this the CPU bottle neck is removed entirely from the process of moving data in and out of virtual machines. With SR-IOV that issue is addressed as it allows moving data in and out of a virtual machine to the physical NIC via Direct memory Access (DMA). But still the hypervisor still has to touch every packet coming in and out. VMQ took away the overload of a single core in the host have to be involved in handle all the incoming traffic. Well it does away with some overhead that still remains with VMQ. So where does SR-IOV fit in when compared to VMQ? And as technology advances weвЂ™ll only see these limits go up as the SR-IOV standard itself allows for more VFs. I donвЂ™t know what they are for Hyper-V 3.0 but there will be limits to the number of SR-IOV NIC is a server and the number of VFs per core and host but I think they wonвЂ™t matter to much for most of us in reality.

So 64 or 32 VFs might be about the maximum but still, 64*2=128 virtual devices from a dual port 10Gbps NIC is already pretty impressive to me. But in reality that might not viable due to the overhead in hardware resources associated with this. IвЂ™ve read in an HP document that you can have 1 to 6 PFs per device (NIC port) and up to 256 вЂњvirtual devicesвЂќ or VF per NIC today. Until Windows 8, Hyper-V did not support SR-IOV but now it does. And of cause SR-IOV also needs to be supported by the hypervisor. A modern quality NIC targeted at the virtualization market supports this. Now most decent to high end server CPUs today support it, so thatвЂ™s not an issue. ItвЂ™s not just the NIC by the way, SR-IOV also needs a modern BIOS with virtualization support. So SR-IOV depends on both hardware (NIC) and software (hypervisor) that supports it. The hyper visor needs to support SR-IOV because it needs to know what PFs and VFs are en how they work. This reduces overhead on CPU load and increases performance of the host and as such also helps with network I/O to and from the guests, itвЂ™s as if the virtual machine uses the physical NIC in the host directly.

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The guest can then use the VF NIC ports via VF driver (so there need to be VF drivers in the integration components) and traffic is send directly (via DMA) in and out of the guest to the physical NIC bypassing the virtual switch of the hyper visor completely. ItвЂ™s up to the hypervisor (software dependency) to assign one or more of these VFs to a virtual Machine (VM) directly. However you can have many of them tied to one PF but they share the configuration of the PF. VF are only capable of data transfers in and out of devices and canвЂ™t be configured or act like real PCIe devices. There is only one PF per port on a physical NIC.

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A PF acts like a full blown PCIe device and is configurable, it acts and functions like a physical device. The virtualized instances of that physical device (that port on our NIC that gets emulated x times) are the Virtual Functions (VF). The physical device (think of this a port on a NIC) is known as a Physical Function (PF). SR-IOV achieves this by using NICs that support this (hardware dependent) by use physical functions (PFs) and virtual functions (VFs). What does SR-IOV do?Д«asically SR-IOV allows a single PCIe device to emulate multiple instances of that physical PCIe device on the PCI bus. This is beyond the scope of this blog but you can imagine this being used in future high density blade server topologies and such to share connectivity among systems.

The Multi Root I/O Virtualization (MR-IOV) is a specification where it can be shared by multiple systems. The вЂњSingle RootвЂќ part means that the PCIe device can only be shared with one system. SR-IOV stands for Single Root I/O Virtualization. IвЂ™m not a hardware of software network engineer but this is my perspective on what it is and why itвЂ™s valuable addition to the toolbox of Hyper-V in Windows 8.

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