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Re: [Xen-users] Xen and InfiniBand

To: xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, christianstenzel@xxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [Xen-users] Xen and InfiniBand
From: Francesco Polzella <f.polzella@xxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 07 Mar 2008 14:19:51 +0100
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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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