[Lustre-discuss] Virtual machines

[Dardo D Kleiner - CONTRACTOR]

On 9/8/10 8:09 AM, Brian J. Murrell wrote:
> On Wed, 2010-09-08 at 05:50 -0500, Brian O'Connor wrote:
>> Does lustre work in a VM?
>
> Yes, of course, given that a VM provides an entire virtual computer.
>
>> what about in a VM over Infiniband?
>
> I don't know of any VMs which expose the hosts Infiniband hardware for
> the VM to use directly.  Xen might.  libvirt/kvm might.  But those are
> just WAGs.

AFAIK, Xen can only expose IB HCAs to guests via PCI passthrough:

http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenPCIpassthrough

Mellanox has a modified OFED 1.3.1 for VMWare that provides "Virtual-IQ", never tried it myself though:

http://www.mellanox.com/content/pages.php?pg=products_dyn&product_family=36&menu_section=34

You can bridge IPoIB interfaces into guests just like any other network device (and thus socklnd).

You can export SRP block devices to guests just like any other block device (e.g. for OST/MDT).

Ideally, someone would implement SR-IOV support in OFED:

http://www.pcisig.com/specifications/iov/

Which works nicely for, e.g. igb.

Lots of talk about IB virtualization a few years ago, unfortunately doesn't appear to be much recent work in this area that I can find.

- Dardo