In
virtualization
In computing, virtualization or virtualisation (sometimes abbreviated v12n, a numeronym) is the act of creating a virtual (rather than actual) version of something at the same abstraction level, including virtual computer hardware platforms, stor ...
, single root input/output virtualization (SR-IOV) is a specification that allows the isolation of
PCI Express
PCI Express (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express), officially abbreviated as PCIe or PCI-e, is a high-speed serial computer expansion bus standard, designed to replace the older PCI, PCI-X and AGP bus standards. It is the common ...
resources for manageability and performance reasons.
Details
A single physical
PCI Express
PCI Express (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express), officially abbreviated as PCIe or PCI-e, is a high-speed serial computer expansion bus standard, designed to replace the older PCI, PCI-X and AGP bus standards. It is the common ...
bus can be shared in a virtual environment using the SR-IOV specification. The SR-IOV offers different
virtual functions to different virtual components (e.g.
network adapter
A network interface controller (NIC, also known as a network interface card, network adapter, LAN adapter or physical network interface, and by similar terms) is a computer hardware component that connects a computer to a computer network.
Ear ...
) on a physical server machine. SR-IOV uses physical and virtual functions to control or configure PCIe devices. Physical functions have the ability to move data in and out of the device while virtual functions are lightweight PCIe functions that support data flowing but also have a restricted set of configuration resources. The virtual or physical functions available to the
hypervisor
A hypervisor (also known as a virtual machine monitor, VMM, or virtualizer) is a type of computer software, firmware or hardware that creates and runs virtual machines. A computer on which a hypervisor runs one or more virtual machines is calle ...
or guest operating system depend on the PCIe device.
The SR-IOV allows different
virtual machines
In computing, a virtual machine (VM) is the virtualization/ emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve specialized hard ...
(VMs) in a virtual environment to share a single
PCI Express
PCI Express (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express), officially abbreviated as PCIe or PCI-e, is a high-speed serial computer expansion bus standard, designed to replace the older PCI, PCI-X and AGP bus standards. It is the common ...
hardware interface. In contrast, MR-IOV allows I/O PCI Express to share resources among different VMs on different physical machines.
InfiniBand
A major field of application for SR-IOV is within the
high-performance computing
High-performance computing (HPC) uses supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems.
Overview
HPC integrates systems administration (including network and security knowledge) and parallel programming into a mult ...
(HPC) field. The use of high-performance
InfiniBand
InfiniBand (IB) is a computer networking communications standard used in high-performance computing that features very high throughput and very low latency. It is used for data interconnect both among and within computers. InfiniBand is also used ...
networking cards is growing within the HPC sector, and there is early research into the use of SR-IOV to allow for the use of InfiniBand within virtual machines such as
Xen.
[http://datasys.cs.iit.edu/reports/2014_IIT_virtualization-fermicloud.pdf ]
See also
*
I/O virtualization
In virtualization, input/output virtualization (I/O virtualization) is a methodology to simplify management, lower costs and improve performance of servers in enterprise environments. I/O virtualization environments are created by abstracting the ...
References
{{Reflist
Hardware virtualization
Computer networking
Peripheral Component Interconnect