LSI is showcasing their first storage controller supporting SR-IOV technology at the Intel Developer Forum. If you’d like to have a look, stop by booth #517.
SR-IOV (Single Root I/O Virtualization) is a technology that speeds up virtualization by enabling a controller to appear as a physical device in more than one virtual machine. By pushing some of the virtualization logic to the controller, the hypervisor has less work, thus speeding up the functions performed by the hardware.
I’ve seen the technology used mostly in network adapters; Xen has seen some patches to support this added by (among others) Intel. LSI thinks this will become a major selling point for their products:
Based on industry-standard I/O technology specifications developed by PCI-SIG, SR-IOV enables a single physical instance of the storage controller to appear as a number of virtual controllers. This allows multiple operating systems running simultaneously within a single computer to natively share PCI Express® devices, resulting in dramatically increased server efficiency, improved system performance and more finely-tuned quality of service (QoS) and data security.
I’m not so sure about the QoS and security parts; that will depend largely upon the way this will be implemented by both the controller and hypervisor. But if implemented correctly, this will definitely give a boost to the performance of virtual machines using direct-attached storage.
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