Abstract

Paravirtual devices are common in virtualized environments, providing improved virtual device performance compared to emulated physical devices. For virtualization to make inroads in High Performance Computing and other areas that require high bandwidth and low latency, high-performance transports such as InfiniBand, the Internet Wide Area RDMA Protocol (iWARP), and RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) must be virtualized.

We developed a paravirtual interface called Virtual RDMA (vRDMA) that provides an RDMA-like interface for VMware ESXi guests. vRDMA uses the Virtual Machine Communication Interface (VMCI) virtual device to interact with ESXi. The vRDMA interface is designed to support snapshots and VMware vMotion® so the state of the virtual machine can be easily isolated and transferred. This paper describes our vRDMA design and its components, and outlines the current state of work and challenges faced while developing this device.

Authors

Adit Ranadive, Bhavesh Davda