Mellanox OFED for Windows Server 2012 Beta

Overview

“Windows Server 2012” File Servers (SMB2) support the use of an InfiniBand card providing the ability to function at high performance, very low latency while using minimal CPU utilization. For application server workloads like SQL or Hyper-V, this allows a remote file server that performs much like local storage.

The main advantages of this solution are:

  • Minimal CPU utilization for remote file storage processing
  • Low Latency
  • Fiber Channel equivalent solution at a lower cost

Requirements

To use SMB2 direct (over InfiniBand) you needs a Mellanox NIC that supports InifiniBand. The NIC can work over InfiniBand or RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet).

The NIC should contain firmware v2.9.8350 or higher. If the NIC does not contain the above firmware, then SMB over RDMA will fail and the default NIC (usually 1Gbe Ethernet) will be used instead.


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Mellanox OFED for Windows Server 2012 Beta Installation Package