Use a Paravirtual RDMA Network Adapter with vSphere Bitfusion

You can use a Paravirtual RDMA (PVRDMA) adapter to improve the performance of your vSphere Bitfusion deployment.

RDMA provides direct memory access from the memory of one computer to the memory of another computer without involving the operating system or CPU. The transfer of memory is offloaded to the RDMA-capable Host Channel Adapters (HCA). A PVRDMA network adapter provides remote direct memory access in a virtual environment.

Prerequisites

Your vSphere environment must have PVRDMA set up before you configure vSphere Bitfusion to use PVRDMA. To learn more, see the vSphere Networking documentation.
vSphere Bitfusion servers and clients must be configured with two network adapters. Use the first network adapter for a management traffic using a default adapter type such as VMXNET3. Use the second network adapter for PVRDMA traffic.
You must power off the vSphere Bitfusion server and client virtual machines prior toconfiguring them to use PVRDMA adapters.

Procedure

Locate the virtual machines hosting the vSphere Bitfusion servers and clients in the vSphere Client.
Right-click a virtual machine in the inventory and select Edit Settings.
From the Add new device drop-down menu, select Network Adapter 2.
The New Network section is added to the list in the Virtual Hardware tab.
Select a PVRDMA network.
Expand the New Network section and connect the virtual machine to a distributed port group.
Change the Status setting to Connect at power on.
From the Adapter type drop-down menu, select PVRDMA.
Power on the virtual machine.
If you powered on a virtual machine that is hosting the vSphere Bitfusion clients, install the RDMA drivers.
In addition to the RDMA drivers, diagnostic tools are installed.
- For CentOS and Red Hat Linux, run the following command.
```
yum install -y open-vm-tools rdma-core libibverbs libibverbs-utils infiniband-diags
```
- For Ubuntu Linux, run the following command.
```
sudo apt-get install -y rdma-core libmlx4-1 infiniband-diags ibutils ibverbs-utils rdmacm-utils perftest
```

Results

You have successfully enabled vSphere Bitfusion to use PVRDMA network adapters.

You can test the connection between the vSphere Bitfusion server and client by using the ib_send_bw (InfinBand send bandwidth) command. For example, if the IP addresses of the vSphere Bitfusion server and client are 192.168.10.10 and 192.16.10.11, run the following commands.

#From the server 192.16.10.10 
ib_send_bw

#From the client 192.16.10.11 - connects to the server
ib_send_bw 192.168.10.10

The vSphere Bitfusion client writes a bandwidth report to standard output (stdout).