Implementing SR-IOV on HP ProLiant Servers with VMware vSphere 5.1

Technical white paper | Implementing SR-IOV on HP ProLiant Servers with VMware vSphere 5.1

Figure 3. Use the RBSU to enable SR-IOV

5. Install ESXi 5.1 using the HP Customized ESXi Image for vSphere 5.1 No specific settings are requried during installation

to provide SR-IOV support.

Configure

After installing ESXi on the host, enumerate the VFs and configure the VM:

1. Determine the network adapters to use for SR-IOV. If any of the network adapters utilize a vSwitch, either remove the

vSwitch or assign a different network adapter to the vSwitch. After a PF has been configured for SR-IOV, the associated

vmnic is removed from the attached vSwitch.

2. Configure the PF device driver for SR-IOV by either an esxcli command or a host file.

– Esxcli command

Use one of the following interfaces to configure the PF device driver through an esxcli command:

• vSphere command line interface (CLI)

• Secure Shell (SSH)

• ESXi Shell

The following example configures the PF device driver for a two-port, Intel 82599-based network adapter. Each

network adapter port (or PF) enumerates 20 VFs. There are a total of 40 VFs that are evenly distributed between the

ports:

# esxcli system module parameters set --module ixgbe --parameter-

string=max_vfs=20,20

The example below enables 30 total VFs distributed across across four ports on a system configured with an

Intel 82599-based network adapter. The first two PFs are set to enumerate five VFs, the third PF to zero VFs, and the

fourth PF to 20 VFs. When the VF value is set to zero, it indicates that the port will not be utilized for SR-IOV.

# esxcli system module parameters set --module ixgbe --parameter-

string=max_vfs=5,5,0,20