Second part of the SR-IOV networking post I wrote for the Red Hat Stack blog.

In the previous blog post in this series we looked at what single root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV) networking is all about and we discussed why it is an important addition to Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform. In this second post we would like to provide a more detailed overview of the implementation, some thoughts on the current limitations, as well as what enhancements are being worked on in the OpenStack community.

Note: this post does not intend to provide a full end to end configuration guide. Customers with an active subscription are welcome to visit the official article covering SR-IOV Networking in Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 6 for a complete procedure.

Setting up the Environment

In our small test environment we used two physical nodes: one serves as a Compute node for hosting virtual machine (VM) instances, and the other serves as both the OpenStack Controller and…