HP-UX vPars and Integrity VM V6.3 Administrator Guide

8 Creating virtual and direct I/O networks
The vPars and Integrity VM supports two types of networking I/O: AVIO and DIO. With AVIO
networking, the I/O device drivers for the devices in the guest operating system are virtualization
aware, eliminating some of the virtualization overhead. However, the guest operating system still
does not have direct visibility to the underlying hardware, and the remaining virtualization overhead
prevents the guest from achieving near native performance for certain I/O intensive workloads.
With DIO networking, which is supported on HP Integrity Server Blade system BL8x0c i2/i4, HP
Integrity Superdome 2 i2/i4, and rx2800 i2/i4, a vPar and a VM can have direct control of the
I/O device. The DIO networking feature minimizes the device emulation overhead and also allows
guest operating systems to control devices for which emulation does not exist, thus enabling access
to I/O hardware technology without requiring the support of either vPars or Integrity VM.
NOTE: Both AVIO and DIO networking support HP Virtual Connect.
The basic network configuration with a combination of virtual and direct I/O network interfaces
is illustrated in Figure 12 (page 111).
Figure 12 Virtual and DIO network configuration
pNIC 2
IIIIIIIIIIII
vNIC 1
IIIIIIIIIIII
pNIC 1 (DIO)
IIIIIIIIIIII
vNIC 1
IIIIIIIIIIII
vNIC 2
IIIIIIIIIIII
vNIC 1
IIIIIIIIIIII
Localnet
Virtualization Services Platform (VSP)
Data Center Network
Guest 1
Guest 2 Guest 3
vswitch 1
vNIC 2
IIIIIIIIIIII
111