Re: [Xen-users] Xen and InfiniBand

[Francesco Polzella <f.polzella@xxxxxxxx>]

> Hello list,
>
> I'm planning to set up a cluster with an Infiniband interconnection 
> network. The cluster consists of multiple PCs - each equipped with two 
> Intel XEON 64bit QuadCores and providing up to 7 virtual XEN instances.
> I'm very new to IB, so my questions are:
>
> 1) Is there a tutorial about XEN and IB available?
>
> 2) Is IB supported by the XEN kernel?
>
> 3) Which IB adapters are supported?
>
> 4) Is ist possible that the virtual xen instances (DomNs) share the IB 
> adapter
> and provide XEN bridging or natting solution similar to Ethernet?
>
> 5) What differences exist when using IB between paravirtual
> XEN instances and Hardware Virtual Machines?
>
> Hope for feedback
> Christian Stenzel
>   
Hi,
some time ago I' have worked on IB in a xen virtual cluster environment.
As far as I can remember a driver to use IB directly in the DomU was in 
early stage of development;
we had to use a module (in the Dom0) that create a fake eth interface 
that let you to access IB
from the domU like a standard eth (IP-over-IB solution).
Using this kind of solution the network performance between DomUs 
dropped of about 50% respect to the nominal band provided
by the IB device.

The IB board was based upon a Mellanox  chipset and gave no particular 
problems.
Let me know if you find something new.

Bye

Francesco Polzella 

    

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