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 -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ali Ayoub Sent: 26 December 2010 07:43 To: Christoph Lameter Cc: linux-rdma; sebastien dugue; Richard Croucher; OF EWG Subject: Re: [ewg] IPoIB to Ethernet routing performance On Thu, Dec 9, 2010 at 3:46 PM, Christoph Lameter <[email protected]> wrote: > On Mon, 6 Dec 2010, sebastien dugue wrote: > >> > The Mellanox BridgeX looks a better hardware solution with 12x 10Ge >> > ports but when I tested this they could only provide vNIC >> > functionality and would not commit to adding IPoIB gateway on their >> > roadmap. >> >> Right, we did some evaluation on it and this was really a show stopper. > > Did the same thing here came to the same conclusions. May I ask why do you need IPoIB when you have EoIB (vNic driver)? Why it's a show stopper? _______________________________________________ ewg mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openfabrics.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ewg _______________________________________________ ewg mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openfabrics.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ewg
