HP Integrity VM Accelerated Virtual I/O Overview

between the guest and the host. These algorithms provide up to a 60% reduction in the CPU costs and
up to 2X the I/O rate of the legacy SCSI driver in I/O intensive workloads.
Several common applications such as file systems, mail and Oracle DBMS use either a 4KB or an
8KB IO size. For such workload, AVIO is expected to provide between twenty-five and fifty percent
reduction in CPU utilization and between thirty-five and fifty percent improvement in throughput for
I/O intensive workloads.
Changes to Integrity VM Storage and Networking I/O
Commands
The overall configuration process for AVIO is the same as with SCSI and LAN. AVIO does introduce
two new virtual adapter names: avio_lan and avio_stor
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that are used with the hpvmcreate or
hpvmmodify command to specify AVIO devices. In addition, there is a new command line option for
hpvmnet, updated command output for hpvmstatus, and a brand new AVIO storage command (i.e.
gvsdmgr).
The changes are summarized below. Please consult the Integrity VM Version 3.5 or 4.0 man pages
for more details on these commands.
Hpvmcreate / hpvmmodify
The –a rsrc option supports two new virtual adapter types which specify AVIO devices: avio_lan and
avio_stor. After verifying the backing device is supported by AVIO (see the HP Integrity Virtual
Machines Installation, Configuration, and Administration at www.docs.hp.com for more details). For
example, the following commands will enable AVIO LAN and AVIO Storage virtual adapter types
instead of the fully virtualized LAN and SCSI virtual adapter types:
hpvmmodify –P Guest1 –a network:avio_lan::vswitch:vsw1
hpvmmodify –P Guest1 –a disk:avio_stor::disk:/dev/rdsk/c0t0d0
hpvmnet
The –A option to hpvmnet is new for AVIO LAN. For example, the following statistics will be shown
when the command hpvmnet –S vs_site –A is run:
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Aviolan and aviostor may also be used.