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7 PVRDMA Deployment and Configuration of QLogic CNA devices in VMware ESXi | Technical White
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Components of PVRDMA architecture
Component
Description
PVRDMA NIC
The virtual PCIe device providing Ethernet Interface through PVRDMA, the
adapter type and RDMA.
Verbs
RDMA API calls that are proxied to the PVRDMA back-end. The user library
provides direct access to the hardware with a path for data.
PVRDMA driver
Enables the virtual NIC (vNIC) with the IP stack in the kernel space. It also
provides full support for Verbs RDMA API in the user space.
ESXi PVRDMA backend
Creates virtual RDMA resources for the virtual machine where guests can
make use of the resources. It supports features such as Live vMotion,
snapshots and high availability (HA).
ESXi Server
Provides physical Host Channel Adapter (HCA) services on all virtual
machines. Leverages native RDMA and core drivers and creates
corresponding resources in HCA.
1.4 Hardware and software requirements
Note: Configuration of the servers chosen to perform this task should be verified for compatibility on VMware
Compatibility Guide.
To enable RoCE feature on Dell EMC PowerEdge server with QLogic Network Card on VMware ESXi, the
following components are used:
• Server: Dell EMC PowerEdge R7525 server
• Network card: QLogic 2x10GE QL41132HQCU NIC
• Cable: Dell Networking, Cable, SFP+ to SFP+, 10GbE, Copper twinax direct attach cable
• Host OS: VMware ESXi 6.7 or later
• Guest OS: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Version 7.6 or later
The installation process of the network drivers for the attached NIC is contingent on the virtual machine tools
that are used and the version of the operating system that is installed on the host and guest environments.
1.5 Supported configuration
For information about the network cards that are supported to set up this configuration, see the VMware
Compatibility Guide page. Select RoCE v1 and RoCE v2 options from the Features tab and then select the
DELL option from the Brand Name tab.
For information about the network protocols used, see Dell Networking – RDMA over Converged or the Intel®
Ethernet Network Adapters Support page.
vSphere 6.5 and later versions support PVRDMA only in environments with specific a configuration. For more
information, see PVRDMA Support.