Intel Ethernet Cloud White Paper

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As is typical in IT organizations, requirements
and solutions evolve and change over
time. Supporting multiple hypervisors in a
private cloud is a key enabling capability
for optimizing and transitioning your data
center, as shown in Figure 4.
This need arises when different groups
in a company have implemented different
technologies or policies, driven by factors
that include preference and licensing
costs. Different hypervisors take different
approaches to I/O virtualization—Intel
Ethernet provides a single solution by
means of Intel VT-c , providing both
VMDq and SR-IOV support to be used
where appropriate:
• 
 are API implementations of the
VMDq component of Intel VT-c. VMDq is
a virtualized I/O technology built into all
Intel Ethernet 10Gb Server Adapters. The
performance of Intel Ethernet controllers
enabled with VMDq compares favorably
to competing solutions.
• 
(KVM, the virtualization technology used,
for example, in Red Hat Enterprise Linux)
use the SR-IOV support component of
Intel VT-c. SR-IOV delivers performance
benefit by completely bypassing the
hypervisor and utilizing the bridge built
into the server adapter.
3
Because Intel VT-c supports both
these I/O virtualization technologies,
IT organizations can standardize on
Intel Ethernet 10 Gigabit Server Adapters
for all their physical hosts, knowing that
I/O is optimized regardless of which
hypervisor is used. Additionally, if a
server is reprovisioned with a different
hypervisor at some point, no changes
to the server adapter are required
when utilizing Intel VT-c.
Server A1 Server An
Management
Virtual Switch
Intel® VT-c
Console
Aggregation
10GbE Switch
Separate servers are replaced by VMs
on one physical host
Aggregation
GbE Switch
Hypervisor X
Physical Host 1
Aggregation 10GbE,
FCoE Switch
iSCSI, Fibre Channel
SAN with 10GbE
Storage Processor
VM AnVM A1
10GbE
Server
Adapter
LAN
Virtual Switch
Storage
Initiators
Intel® VT-c
GbE
LOM
10GbE
Server
Adapter
Server N1Server Nn
Management
Virtual Switch
Separate servers are replaced by VMs
on one physical host
Hypervisor Y
Physical Host N
VM NnVM N1
LAN
Virtual Switch
Storage
Initiators
GbE
LOM
Intel® VT-c
10GbE
Server
Adapter
Intel® VT-c
10GbE
Server
Adapter
WAN
r
egat
i
on
gation
. Intel® Virtualization for Connectivity supports combinations of all major hypervisors in the same environment by providing both
Virtual Machine Device Queues and Single Root I/O Virtualization support.
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