Using an SR-IOV backed network

Follow these steps to use an SR-IOV connected virtual machine in PowerVC.

1. Add a managed host that has an SR-IOV capable network card.
2. Decide on a physical network name for each SR-IOV network that you will use with PowerVC.
   For example, if your environment has two different Ethernet switches that are not connected to each other or to the internet, you have two physical networks. If you are going to use them both with PowerVC, you should assign a name to each.
3. From the Host Details page, open the SR-IOV Ports tab and associate physical network names with the appropriate ports. PowerVC uses this information to ensure that virtual machines are deployed to the correct network.
4. Use the Add Network page to create a new network and specify the physical network name for that network. When you specify the physical network name, the list of ports from the previous step is shown.
5. You can now choose that SR-IOV network when you deploy a virtual machine or you can attach the SR-IOV network to a virtual machine that was already deployed in PowerVC.
   • Specify Redundant adapter if your network is set up for redundancy. If this is selected, the vNIC adapter created for the virtual machine includes multiple logical ports. These logical ports are isolated as much as possible to provide redundancy by using multiple physical ports, multiple SR-IOV adapters (if possible), and multiple VIOSs (if possible).
   • Use the Virtual NIC capacity to specify Quality of Service (QoS). This is the minimum capacity of this network. During runtime, the virtual machine will have at least this amount of network connectivity capacity. If the requested capacity is not available, the deploy is not allowed.