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Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.0 Administration Guide Oracle VM Server for SPARC |
Part I Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.0 Software
1. Overview of the Oracle VM Server for SPARC Software
2. Installing and Enabling Software
3. Oracle VM Server for SPARC Security
4. Setting Up Services and the Control Domain
How to Create an I/O Domain by Assigning a PCIe Bus
Assigning PCIe Endpoint Devices
Direct I/O Hardware and Software Requirements
Current Direct I/O Feature Limitations
Planning PCIe Endpoint Device Configuration
How to Create an I/O Domain by Assigning a PCIe Endpoint Device
Using PCIe SR-IOV Virtual Functions
SR-IOV Hardware and Software Requirements
Current SR-IOV Feature Limitations
Planning for the Use of PCIe SR-IOV Virtual Functions
Creating, Modifying, and Destroying Virtual Functions
How to Create a Virtual Function
How to Modify a Virtual Function
How to Destroy a Virtual Function
Adding and Removing Virtual Functions on I/O Domains
How to Add a Virtual Function to an I/O Domain
How to Remove a Virtual Function From an I/O Domain
SR-IOV: Rebooting the Root Domain
Using an SR-IOV Virtual Function to Create an I/O Domain
How to Create an I/O Domain by Assigning an SR-IOV Virtual Function to It
SR-IOV Device-Specific Properties
Advanced Network Configuration for Virtual Functions
11. Managing Domain Configurations
12. Performing Other Administration Tasks
Part II Optional Oracle VM Server for SPARC Software
13. Oracle VM Server for SPARC Physical-to-Virtual Conversion Tool
14. Oracle VM Server for SPARC Configuration Assistant (Oracle Solaris 10)
16. Using the Oracle VM Server for SPARC Management Information Base Software
17. Logical Domains Manager Discovery
18. Using the XML Interface With the Logical Domains Manager
An I/O domain has direct ownership of and direct access to physical I/O devices. It can be created by assigning a PCI EXPRESS (PCIe) bus or a PCIe endpoint device to a domain. Use the ldm add-io command to assign a bus or device to a domain.
You might want to configure I/O domains for the following reasons:
An I/O domain has direct access to a physical I/O device, which avoids the performance overhead that is associated with virtual I/O. As a result, the I/O performance on an I/O domain more closely matches the I/O performance on a bare-metal system.
An I/O domain can host virtual I/O services to be used by other guest domains.
For information about configuring I/O domains, see the following:
Note - You cannot migrate an I/O domain that is configured with PCIe endpoint devices. For information about other migration limitations, see Chapter 9, Migrating Domains.
An I/O domain might have direct access to one or more I/O devices, such as PCIe buses, network interface units (NIUs), PCIe endpoint devices, and PCIe single root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV) virtual functions.
This type of direct access to I/O devices means that more I/O bandwidth is available to provide the following:
Services to the applications in the I/O domain
Virtual I/O services to guest domains
The following basic guidelines enable you to effectively utilize the I/O bandwidth:
Assign CPU resources at the granularity of CPU cores. Assign one or more CPU cores based on the type of I/O device and the number of I/O devices in the I/O domain.
For example, a 1-Gbps Ethernet device might require fewer CPU cores to utilize the full bandwidth compared to a 10-Gbps Ethernet device.
Abide by memory requirements. Memory requirements depend on the type of I/O device that is assigned to the domain. A minimum of 4 Gbytes is recommended per I/O device. The more I/O devices you assign, the more memory you must allocate.
When you use the PCIe SR-IOV feature, follow the same guidelines for each SR-IOV virtual function that you would use for other I/O devices. So, assign one or more CPU cores and memory (in Gbytes) to fully utilize the bandwidth that is available from the virtual function.
Note that creating and assigning a large number of virtual functions to a domain that does not have sufficient CPU and memory resources is unlikely to produce an optimal configuration.