Mellanox OFED Drivers for Novell-XEN (Alpha)

Mellanox is pleased to announce the availability of the InfiniBand adapter support package for the XEN Hypervisor by Novell. This is an alpha release and supports Novell SLES 10 and SLERT based XEN hypervisor and SLES and RHEL based guest operating systems. Windows Server 2003 guest support will be available in the future.

Supported Adapters	Details
MT25208 InfiniHost III Ex (Tavor / InfiniHost compatibility mode)	InfiniHost™ III HCA/TCA IC, dual-port, SDR/DDR, PCIe x8, DDR memory interface, RoHS

MemFree Cards will be supported in the future

Solution Benefits

• The software drivers are based on OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED) version 1.2 enabling broad interoperability with other operating systems and the ecosystem of OEM supplied servers, switches, gateways and storage systems
• LAN and NFS functionality is available over unified server I/O using high bandwidth, low latency InfiniBand connectivity. Connectivity to Ethernet LAN is through InfiniBand-Ethernet gateways supplied by leading OEMs
• Implements complete VMM bypass, enabling direct guess access to InfiniBand adapter
• No hypervisor changes are needed.  That is works with standard XEN hypervisor
• Guest allocation and reservation of User Access Regions
• IP Sockets performance equal to native Linux environments using IPoIB and IPoIB CM available in OFED 1.2.  Measured performance is in the range of 500 MB/s to 850 MB/s depending on server system configuration.

InfiniBand Channel I/O Virtualization (CIOV) Technology
The Mellanox driver implementation within the XEN framework follows the hardware-based I/O virtualization model and implements Mellanox InfiniBand CIOV technology.

Support
Please contact your Mellanox account representative for support information.

Related Links

• I/O Virtualization
• Virtualizing InfiniBand in Xen
• InfiniBand Device Virtualization in Xen
• InfiniBand on Xen Update
• InfiniBand Support in Xen Virtual Machine Environment

Software and Documentation
The software package includes binary and source RPMs for enabling networking support for Novell XEN based hypervisor and guest operating systems.