In Oracle Solaris, you can associate the virtual function (VF) of a network device that supports SR-IOV with a VNIC or a VLAN. A VF VNIC is a VNIC that owns a dedicated VF. A VF VNIC differs from a regular VNIC in the sharing of resources. A regular VNIC needs to share resources with other regular VNICs, but a VF VNIC need not share resources. Each VF is a separate hardware resource for the VF VNIC.
You can create VF VNICs only over datalinks that support the SR-IOV mode. By default, the SR-IOV mode of a datalink is disabled. You can enable the SR-IOV mode of a datalink by setting the iov property to on. For information about creating VF VNICs after you enable the SR-IOV mode of a datalink, see Creating VF VNICs.
You can check the SR-IOV mode of a datalink by specifying the link property iov with the dladm show-linkprop command. If the value under the EFFECTIVE column of the output is off, the SR-IOV mode of the datalink is disabled.
The following example shows how you can check the SR-IOV mode of the datalink net0.
# dladm show-linkprop -p iov net0 LINK PROPERTY PERM VALUE EFFECTIVE DEFAULT POSSIBLE net0 iov rw auto off auto auto,on,off
In this example, the SR-IOV mode of the datalink net0 is disabled. The output shows the following information:
Specifies the value that you have set for the iov link property. If you have not modified the iov link property, the default value of the iov link property is auto. The value of auto means that the OS determines whether the SR-IOV mode is enabled by default on a particular physical datalink.
The actual SR-IOV mode of the datalink. By default, all SRIOV-capable NICs show the value off under the EFFECTIVE column.
You can enable the SR-IOV mode of the datalink net0 by setting the iov property to on as follows:
# dladm set-linkprop -p iov=on net0 # dladm show-linkprop -p iov net0 LINK PROPERTY PERM VALUE EFFECTIVE DEFAULT POSSIBLE net0 iov rw on on auto auto,on,off
Similarly, you can disable the SR-IOV mode of a datalink by setting the iov link property to off. For more information about the dladm command, see the dladm (1M) man page.