“Everything You Wanted to Know about SR-IOV in Hyper-V” by John Howard

Very good articles on SRIOV by John Howard.

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Part 1: http://blogs.technet.com/b/jhoward/archive/2012/03/12/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-sr-iov-in-hyper-v-part-1.aspx

Part 1 discusses emulated versus software devices, the pros and cons and constraints of each and why Microsoft is investing in SR-IOV.

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Part 2: http://blogs.technet.com/b/jhoward/archive/2012/03/13/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-sr-iov-in-hyper-v-part-2.aspx

Part 2 discusses the SR-IOV standard, physical functions (PFs) virtual functions (VFs) and the hardware requirements to make SR-IOV even possible.

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Part 3: http://blogs.technet.com/b/jhoward/archive/2012/03/14/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-sr-iov-in-hyper-v-part-3.aspx

Part 3 discusses device drivers and how they function in an SR-IOV environment as well as screenshots of an SR-IOV NIC within a Hyper-V VM.

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Part 4: http://blogs.technet.com/b/jhoward/archive/2012/03/15/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-sr-iov-in-hyper-v-part-4.aspx

Part 4 discusses some of the low level necessary firmware and motherboard changes to make SR-IOV function and provides a pointer to an interesting presentation given 4 years ago at WinHEC 2008 by Jake Oshins that provides further insight into SR-IOV.

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Part 5: http://blogs.technet.com/b/jhoward/archive/2012/03/16/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-sr-iov-in-hyper-v-part-5.aspx

Part 5 explains the IO path with SR-IOV enabled, covers SR-IOV configuration via the UI and a deeper dive into PowerShell.

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Part 6: http://blogs.technet.com/b/jhoward/archive/2012/03/19/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-sr-iov-in-hyper-v-part-6.aspx

Part 6 discusses SR-IOV and Live Migration in detail. It covers the engineering challenge of making SR-IOV work with Live Migration (not trivial folks) and even includes a video that demonstrates a virtual machine with an SR-IOV NIC under load being Live Migrated. There’s even a link to a WinHEC 2006 presentation (told you we’ve been looking at this technology a while…)

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Part 7: http://blogs.technet.com/b/jhoward/archive/2012/03/20/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-sr-iov-in-hyper-v-part-7.aspx

Part 7 discusses SR-IOV and how it works with the new inbox Windows Server 2012 NIC Teaming. Yes folks, you can team SR-IOV NICs in the guest.

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Part 8: http://blogs.technet.com/b/jhoward/archive/2012/03/21/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-sr-iov-in-hyper-v-part-8.aspx

Part 8 discusses debugging SR-IOV and includes examples in PowerShell and covers troubleshooting through the Event Viewer.