About pvrdma setting

[Kelvin201807]

Hi buddies,

From vsphere vcenter 6.5, it supports pvrdma.

My environment:

My esxi is 6.5, My guest OS is centos 7.1. Mellanox hca card and Mellanox infiniband switch in ethernet mode.

I create a NIC of type pvrdma, attach to the guest OS. I want to know:

1. If I still need to install something or do some configurations on my guest OS?

2. How to test pvrdma performance in my environment?

3. Want to confirm if vsphere 6.5 only support RoCE as its document said?

Thanks in advance.

[o5jeff]

a quick answer:

1. first of all, you need to make sure to have correct pairs of HCA firmware and vSphere native IB driver versions for your vSphere release. You can find it in VMware website, hardware compatibility page.

2. install the correct version of MFT for vSphere from Mellanox and make sure everything to work smoothly - the most important: make sure HCA linkUP and HCA port type -> 2 !!! 

3. read the vSphere networking configuration document, the PVRDMA section

4. try-and-error

for your question#1, yes you'd better google "pvrdma guest driver"

for your question #3, AFAIK, Yes and true for 6.5&6.7.