Dell Mellanox Family of Adapters - Manual (Page 14)

Introduction Rev 1.1
Mellanox Technologies 14
instances of the device with separate resources. Mellanox adapters are capable of exposing up to
126 virtual instances called Virtual Functions (VFs). These virtual functions can then be provi-
sioned separately. Each VF can be seen as an addition device connected to the Physical Function.
It shares the same resources with the Physical Function, and its number of ports equals those of
the Physical Function. SR-IOV is commonly used in conjunction with an SR-IOV enabled hyper-
visor to provide virtual machines direct hardware access to network resources hence increasing
its performance.
1.2.2 Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA)
Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) is the remote memory management capability that
allows server to server data movement directly between application memory without any CPU
involvement. RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) is a mechanism to provide this efficient
data transfer with very low latencies on loss-less Ethernet networks. With advances in data center
convergence over reliable Ethernet, ConnectX®-3 EN with RoCE uses the proven and efficient
RDMA transport to provide the platform for deploying RDMA technology in mainstream data
center application at 10GigE and 40GigE link-speed. ConnectX®-3 EN with its hardware offload
support takes advantage of this efficient RDMA transport (InfiniBand) services over Ethernet to
deliver ultra low latency for performance-critical and transaction intensive applications such as
financial, database, storage, and content delivery networks. RoCE encapsulates IB transport and
GRH headers in Ethernet packets bearing a dedicated ether type. While the use of GRH is
optional within InfiniBand subnets, it is mandatory when using RoCE. Applications written over
IB verbs should work seamlessly, but they require provisioning of GRH information when creat-
ing address vectors. The library and driver are modified to provide mapping from GID to MAC
addresses required by the hardware.
1.3 Supported Operating Systems/Distributions
• RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
• SuSe Linux Enterprise Server (SLES)
• OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED)
• Microsoft Windows Server Family of Operating Systems
• VMware ESX
For the list of the specific supported operating systems and distributions, please refer to
the release notes for the applicable software downloads on the Dell support site:
http://
www.dell.com/support .