[Lustre-discuss] Virtual machines

[Steven Timm]

Mellanox sold us "ConnectX-2" IB cards earlier this year which
claim to not only work on a single VM, passed through via pci 
pass-through, but also to be able to be shared between multiple VM's.
Vmware support was supposed to be there at the time, then KVM and Xen.

We are already running Lustre under KVM on our cloud cluster but we have
not yet had time to try the infiniband feature to see if we can
see the infiniband cards in the VM.  But the vanilla Xen kernel on
the bare metal does recognize the infiniband card so that is a good sign.

(PS--the Lustre-under-KVM is a proof-of-concept only at this stage,
obviously you do not get the kind of throughput that you get
on bare metal.)

Steve

On Wed, 8 Sep 2010, Kevin Van Maren wrote:

> I seem to recall Mellanox presenting a paper on IB support virtual
> machines at SC two years ago.  I think it was just a proof of concept,
> and I'm unaware of the current status.
>
> Kevin
>
>
> On Sep 8, 2010, at 6:09 AM, "Brian J. Murrell"
> <brian.murrell at oracle.com> 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.
>>
>> b.
>>
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-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------
Steven C. Timm, Ph.D  (630) 840-8525
timm at fnal.gov  http://home.fnal.gov/~timm/
Fermilab Computing Division, Scientific Computing Facilities,
Grid Facilities Department, FermiGrid Services Group, Assistant Group Leader.