The IB SM group provides address lookup service for end nodes. When you create an SM group, you can assign multiple SM devices to that group to provide redundancy for your IB subnets.
An SM group should contain the switches where OpenSM will run. Using the GUI to set this up ensures that the configuration changes for an SM group are applied to all the affected devices.
The SM group performs the following configuration tasks on the IB fabric:
Programs switch forwarding tables based upon selected routing algorithm.
Programs P_KEY tables on HCAs and switches.