[ewg] IPoIB to Ethernet routing performance

[Richard Croucher]

The vNIC driver only works when you have Ethernet/InfiniBand hardware
gateways in your environment.   It is useful when you have external hosts to
communicate with which do not have direct InfiniBand connectivity.
IPoIB is still heavily used in these environments to provide TCP/IP
connectivity within the InfiniBand fabric.
The primary Use Case for vNICs is probably for virtualization servers, so
that individual Guests can be presented with a virtual Ethernet NIC and do
not lead to load any InfiniBand drivers.  Only the hypervisor needs to have
the InfiniBand software stack loaded.
I've also applied vNICs in the Financial Services arena, for connectivity to
external TCP/IP services but there the IPoIB gateway function is arguably
more useful.

The whole vNIC arena is complicated by different, incompatible
implementations from each of Qlogic and Mellanox.

Richard

-----Original Message-----
From: ewg-bounces at lists.openfabrics.org
[mailto:ewg-bounces at lists.openfabrics.org] On Behalf Of Ali Ayoub
Sent: 26 December 2010 07:43
To: Christoph Lameter
Cc: linux-rdma; sebastien dugue; Richard Croucher; OF EWG
Subject: Re: [ewg] IPoIB to Ethernet routing performance

On Thu, Dec 9, 2010 at 3:46 PM, Christoph Lameter <cl at linux.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 6 Dec 2010, sebastien dugue wrote:
>
>> > The Mellanox BridgeX looks a better hardware solution with 12x 10Ge
>> > ports but when I tested this they could only provide vNIC
>> > functionality and would not commit to adding IPoIB gateway on their
>> > roadmap.
>>
>>   Right, we did some evaluation on it and this was really a show stopper.
>
> Did the same thing here came to the same conclusions.

May I ask why do you need IPoIB when you have EoIB (vNic driver)?
Why it's a show stopper?
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