HP vPars and Integrity Virtual Machines V6.1 Administrator Guide

drivers for these 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 overheads prevent the guest
from achieving near native performance for certain I/O intensive workloads. With direct I/O
networking, which is supported on HP Integrity Server Blade system BL8x0c i2 and HP Integrity
Superdome 2 servers, a vPar and a VM can have direct control of the I/O of a device. The direct
I/O networking feature minimizes the device emulation overhead, and also allows guest operating
systems to control devices for which no emulation exists, enabling access to I/O hardware
technology without requiring support from vPars or Integrity VM.
NOTE: Both AVIO networking and direct I/O networking support HP Virtual Connect.
Use of the avio_lan parameter for networking and the avio_stor parameter for storage provide
the AVIO capability for vPars and VMs. For information about AVIO, see“Using AVIO with vPars
and Integrity VM” (page 17). The hpvmhwmgmt command provides the dio parameter to designate
a resource pool and allows the creation and management of a pool of direct I/O network capable
devices that can be assigned to vPars or VMs. For information about direct I/O networking , see
“Using direct I/O networking” (page 19).
1.7.1 Using AVIO with vPars and Integrity VM
AVIO is supported by multiple vPar/VM and guest operating systems. For AVIO support details,
see the HP–UX vPars and Integrity VM V6.1 Release Notes and the AVIO product documentation.
The vPar/VM configuration file and the hpvmstatus command and the vparstatus command
display the avio_lan and avio_stor designators.
NOTE: HP strongly recommends that you use the same AVIO components from the same release
on both the VSP and vPar/VMs, for example, both from the OE or both from the same Web Release
(for example, WEB1103).
The following example shows the hpvmstatus command output of AVIO adapters for guest
avioclone:
[Storage Interface Details]
Guest Device type :disk
Guest Adaptor type :avio_stor
Bus :0
Device :0
Function :0
Target :3
Lun :0
Physical Storage type :disk
Physical device :/dev/rdisk/disk2
[Network Interface Details]
Physical Storage type :vswitch
Guest Adaptor type :avio_lan
Backing :swlan1
Vswitch Port :5
Bus :0
Device :1
Function :0
Mac Address :2a-2e-5a-05-0a-ba
Physical Storage type :vswitch
Guest Adaptor type :avio_lan
Backing :swlan2
Vswitch port :9
Bus :0
Device :2
1.7 Types of I/O 17