[dpdk-dev] Recommended method of using DPDK inside a Vmware ESXi guest ?

[dpdk-dev] Recommended method of using DPDK inside a Vmware ESXi guest ?

[Ale Mansoor]

Hi, 
I am trying to use dpdk inside a Vmware 6.0 ESXi guest and see two possible approaches to achieving this:
Use vmxnet3-usermap with PMD Use igb_uio with SRIOV passthrough from ESXi host to guest
My guest systems are either Fedora Linux FC20 or Ubuntu 15.04 instances with 8 vCpu's and 8 Gigs of memory. 
When using l2fwd example using igb_uio, the performance numbers I got were very low (<100 PPS) and when I tried using vmxnet3-usermap from dpdk.org, it does not even seem to compile under the Linux 3.x Kernel.
My system is a HP DL380 G8 platform with dual Xeon 2670 CPU's and 64 Gb physical memory and Intel 82599 NIC card running ESXi 6.0
Do I need to enable any additional Kernel build or boot options, based on some posts here, appears ESXi does not have emulated IOMMU.
Thanks in advance for your help.
-Ale Mansoor
 		 	   		  

Re: [dpdk-dev] Recommended method of using DPDK inside a Vmware ESXi guest ?

[Matthew Hall]

On Tue, Sep 08, 2015 at 11:43:38PM +0000, Ale Mansoor wrote:
> When using l2fwd example using igb_uio, the performance numbers I got were 
> very low (<100 PPS) and when I tried using vmxnet3-usermap from dpdk.org, it 
> does not even seem to compile under the Linux 3.x Kernel.

Not everybody will have this environment available to do tests.

Can you send the log output, etc. so we could look for issues as well?

Thanks,
Matthew.