Configuring PCI passthrough network
The KVM hypervisor supports directly attaching PCI devices from the host OS to the virtual machines. We can use this feature to attach a network interface directly to the guest OS, without the need for using NAT or software bridges. In this recipe, we are going to attach a Network Interface Card (NIC) that supports SR-IOV Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) from the host to the KVM guest. SR-IOV is a specification that allows a Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe ) device to appear as multiple separate physical devices that can be shared between many virtual machines on the same host, bypassing the hypervisor layer, thus achieving native network speeds. Cloud providers such as Amazon AWS expose this feature for its EC2 compute instances through API calls.
Getting ready
In order to complete this recipe, we are going to need the following:
- A physical host with NIC that supports SR-IOV
- A
802.1Qbhcapable switch with connection to the physical...
