Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Documentation

Configuring SR-IOV for Virtual Networking

On Compute Cloud@Customer, single root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV) technology enables instances to achieve low latency and high throughput simultaneously on 1 or more physical links.

Compute Cloud@Customer supports up to 127 Virtual Functions (VFs) per compute node.

This section describes how to configure SR-IOV networking.

  1. Ensure you have the OraclePCA tag networkType VFIO defined on the system. See Creating OraclePCA Tags.

    Note

    The "networkType": "VFIO" tag can't be changed or removed from a VCN or DRG. The only way to remove this tag is to delete the VCN or DRG.

  2. Create a VCN with SR-IOV functionality enabled.

    Create a VCN and add an OraclePCA tag with the following values, see Creating a VCN:

    • Tag Namespace: Enter "OraclePCA"
    • Key: Enter "networkType"
    • Value: Enter "VFIO"

    You must create a VCN with SR-IOV support enabled, you can't convert an existing VCN to include SR-IOV functionality.

  3. If you plan to use a DRG in your SR-IOV configuration, you must create a DRG with SR-IOV functionality. Only SR-IOV DRGs can attach to SR-IOV VCNs.

    Create a DRG and add an OraclePCA tag with the following values, see Creating a Dynamic Routing Gateway:

    • Tag Namespace: Enter "OraclePCA"
    • Key: Enter "networkType"
    • Value: Enter "VFIO"

    Attach the SR-IOVs VCNs to the DRG.

  4. Prepare an instance for SR-IOV functionality.

    1. Create and launch an instance. See Creating an Instance.
    2. Create and attach a secondary VNIC to the instance to use as the SR-IOV network interface. The primary VNIC of the instance cannot be the SR-IOV VNIC. See Creating and Attaching a Secondary VNIC.
    3. Configure the network bond interfaces, including the secondary IP address on a SR-IOV bond port, using the configure_vfio script provided in the Oracle blog Automating SR-IOV/VFIO bond creation on Private Cloud Appliance and Compute Cloud@Customer available at https://blogs.oracle.com/oracle-systems/.