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Enabling SR-IOV on vRR Instances on KVM

vRR on KVM supports single-root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) interface types. Single root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV) allows a physical function to appear as multiple, separate vNICs. SR-IOV allows a device, such as a network adapter to have separate access to its resources among various hardware functions. If you have a physical NIC that supports SR-IOV, you can attach SR-IOV-enabled vNICs or virtual functions (VFs) to the vRR instances to improve performance.
  • BIOS requirement to enable SR-IOV; Ensure that Intel VT-d or AMD IOMMU are enabled in the systems BIOS settings
  • SR-IOV on VRR for KVM requires one of the following Intel NIC drivers:
    • Intel X710 or XL710 using 40G ports and i40e driver
    • Intel X520 or X540 using 10G ports and ixgbe driver
  • Junos OS Release:
    • Starting with Junos OS Release 17.4 onwards, support for 40G ports with Intel X710/XL710 NICs is available on vRR.
    • Starting with Junos OS Release 20.4R3, support for 10G ports with Intel X520/X540 NICs is available on vRR.
  1. Look for NICs (devices) available on your host using the lshw -businfo -c network command.
    • In the output below: 10G NICs are enp2s0f0 and enp2s0f1
    • 40G NICs are enp4s0f0 and enp4s0f1
  2. Remove any VMs on the host using the device that you plan to configure SR-IOV on.
  3. Check the maximum number of VFs supported on the device (for example enp2s0f0 and enp4s0f0)
  4. Configure the number of VFs you want on the device
  5. Verify if the VFs are created using the lspci command. You should see Virtual Functions corresponding to the Ethernet Controller of the device.
  6. Replace the existing interface stanza for the network device to obtain a new XML. Ensure to keep the management device entry as it is.
  7. Bring up the VRR instance with new SRIOV based interfaces
  8. Finally, to check if the VF devices that are created in Junos vRR, perform grep for “renaming” in the boot messages