You can create instances that use the Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) specification by modifying the metadata parameters of the flavor and image used to create the instance. SR-IOV is a specification that allows a single Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) physical device under a single root port to appear as multiple separate physical devices.
About this task
For more information about SR-IOV requirements and supported features, see the vSphere Web Client documentation.
The following table describes the key components of SR-IOV and their role.
Table 1. SR-IOV Components in the VMware Integrated OpenStack context
Component
Role
Nova Compute
Collects the list of SR-IOV devices and updates the list of PCI device specifications.
Embeds the host object ID in device specifications.
Nova PCI manager
Creates and maintains a device pool with address, vendor ID, product ID, and host ID.
Allocates and deallocates PCI devices to instances based on PCI requests.
Nova scheduler
Schedules instance placement on hosts that matches the PCI requests
vSphere
Manages hosts in a dedicated compute cluster with NICs and hosts enabled for SR-IOV.
A separate compute cluster is recommended because DRS rules do not work on devices enabled for SR-IOV.
Prerequisites
Verify that your deployment is VDS based. SR-IOV does not work with NSX.
Requires VMware Integrated OpenStack version 2.0.x or greater.
