User Manual

Mellanox InfiniBand OFED Driver for VMware® vSphere OverviewRev 1.8.2
Mellanox Technologies
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1 Mellanox InfiniBand OFED Driver for VMware®
vSphere Overview
1.1 Introduction to Mellanox InfiniBand OFED for VMware
Mellanox OFED is a single Virtual Protocol Interconnect (VPI) software stack based on the
OpenFabrics (OFED) Linux stack adapted for VMware, and operates across all Mellanox net
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work adapter solutions supporting up to 56Gb/s InfiniBand (IB) and 2.5 or 5.0 GT/s PCI Express
2.0 and 3.0 uplinks to servers.
All Mellanox network adapter cards are compatible with OpenFabrics-based RDMA protocols
and software, and are supported with major operating system distributions.
1.2 Introduction to Mellanox InfiniBand Adapters
Mellanox InfiniBand (IB) adapters, which are based on Mellanox ConnectX® family adapter
devices, provide leading server and storage I/O performance with flexibility to support the myr
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iad of communication protocols and network fabrics over a single device, without sacrificing
functionality when consolidating I/O. For example, IB-enabled adapters can support:
• Connectivity to 10, 20, 40 and 56Gb/s InfiniBand switches
• A unified application programming interface with access to communication protocols
including: Networking (TCP, IP, UDP, sockets), Storage (NFS, CIFS, iSCSI, SRP and
Clustered Storage), Clustering (MPI, DAPL, RDS, sockets), and Management (SNMP,
SMI-S)
• Communication protocol acceleration engines including: networking, storage, cluster-
ing, virtualization and RDMA with enhanced quality of service
1.3 Mellanox OFED Package
1.3.1 Software Components
MLNX_OFED_VMware contains the following software components:
• CPU architectures:
• x86_64
• ESXi Hypervisor:
• ESXi5.XUX
• Firmware versions:
• ConnectX®-2: 2.9.1000 and above
• ConnectX®-3: 2.11.0500 and above