Managing SR-IOV adapters

Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) is an I/O virtualization technology that is used for the virtualization of I/O resources for individual servers. It logically divides a physical adapter port into multiple logical ports. This technology improves the scalability, flexibility, throughput, and latency performance of networking operations. SR-IOV is supported on certain combinations of Power Systems servers and adapters.

If an adapter supports SR-IOV, the SR-IOV tab is displayed. SR-IOV is an extension to the Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) Express specification to facilitate multiple partitions that are running simultaneously within a single system to share a PCI Express device. An SR-IOV capable adapter can be assigned to a partition to run in dedicated mode. Or, it can be owned by a hypervisor when the SR-IOV adapter is switched to shared mode. When an adapter is assigned to the hypervisor and is operating in shared mode, the adapter can be shared by multiple partitions at the same time.