Dell Emulex Family of Adapters - Manual (Page 620)

Emulex Drivers for Windows User Manual P010077-01A Rev. A
3. Configuration
NIC Driver Configuration
620
3. The program provides a list of available registry parameters to modify or query.
Type either the number of the corresponding option or a substring in the parameter
name. The substring must uniquely identify the parameter or occfg will display all
potential options.
4. To apply the parameters, select the menu item to exit and reload the drivers.
Pressing control -c at any point may leave modifications in the registry, but the
driver does not use the new parameters until is reloaded.
Parameter Help
In interactive mode, setting a parameter will display help text and information
regarding the legal values for each parameter. This information can be dumped for all
parameters by specifying the -h option.
The following is an example help text for the RSS parameter:
RSS:
Receive Side Scaling (RSS) scales receive processing over multiple
CPUs in parallel. This scaling typically improves application
performance; however, it tends to increase CPU usage on low end
machines.
RSS is only supported on two primary adapters per device. It will
appear disabled for additional PCI functions in blade server
configurations.
RSS requires Windows 2008 and later.
Registry Key: *RSS
Default Value : 1 (Enable)
Valid Values :
0 = Disable
1 = Enable
Using SR-IOV with Emulex Devices
Advisory
OCe11100-series adapters may have an issue recovering from the corrupted use of
SR-IOV. Assigning an SR-IOV device to a virtual machine could leave the system
vulnerable and lead to instability. It is strongly recommended that you assign SR-IOV
devices only to virtual machines that run trusted workloads, or consider disabling
SR-IOV.
This advisory is highlighting a use case where a “rogue” [non-Emulex] digitally signed
driver is installed by the system administrator on a virtual machine. It is then possible
for that rogue driver to crash an OCe11100-series networking adapter. While there are
many benefits to using SR-IOV with virtualized workloads, these benefits should be
weighed against the potential risks in doing so. As an example, see the Microsoft
TechNet Blog cited in the link below where the benefits and usage of the Windows
Server 2012 Hyper-V switch versus NIC SR-IOV are noted:
http://www.emulex.com/downloads/sr-iov/