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Introducing Mellanox Quantum Plugin

To: "openstack@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" <openstack@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: Irena Berezovsky <irenab@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sun, 3 Feb 2013 06:20:55 +0000
Accept-language: en-US
Cc: "OpenStack Development Mailing List \(openstack-dev@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx\)" <openstack-dev@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Thread-index: Ac4B1p+sArlVq4UXSTSWn48tW6uF2Q==
Thread-topic: Introducing Mellanox Quantum Plugin

Hi all,
Mellanox Technologies, in our support of Openstack, is releasing the Mellanox Quantum Plugin. This is following our previous announcement of Cinder Transport Acceleration via iSER (iSCSI over RDMA).
The Openstack Mellanox Quantum plugin supports Mellanox embedded switch (eSwitch) functionality as part of the VPI (Ethernet/InfiniBand) network adapter.
The Mellanox Quantum Plugin allows hardware vNICs (mapped to PCI SR-IOV Virtual Functions) per each Virtual Machine vNIC to have its unique connectivity, security, and QoS attributes.
Hardware vNICs can be mapped to the guest VMs through para-virtualization or directly as a Virtual PCI device to the guest, allowing higher performance and advanced features such as RDMA.
Hardware based switching, provides better performance, functionality, and security/isolation for virtual cloud environments.
The current, initial release, of the plugin supports VLAN and Flat networking. The plugin supports 'provider' and 'router' extension.
The plugin is implemented according to the Plugin-Agent pattern.
The plugin supports L3 functionality by maintaining compatibility with the Linux Bridge plugin to be executed by existing agents.
Nova Vif driver is included.
The plugin L2 Agent should be executed on the nodes equipped with Mellanox ConnectX-2 or ConnectX-3 adapters.
Mellanox Quantum Plugin repository: http://www.github.com/mellanox/mlnx

Mellanox Quantum Plugin overview and configuration options: https://github.com/mellanox/mlnx/blob/master/README

A detailed installation guide: https://github.com/mellanox/mlnx/blob/master/install_guide

The current version works with Folsom Release. We are working on support for Grizzly.

Future version of the plugin will support IB networking, 'port-binding' extension and more advanced features as support for OpenFlow API to control granular QoS and Security, and monitor the embedded switch and vNICs functionality.

Any comments or suggestions are more than welcome.
We will be glad to assist anyone who would like to review or test. Contact me or use openstack@xxxxxxxxxxxx<mailto:openstack@xxxxxxxxxxxx> for support/tech questions.

Thanks,
Irena & Mellanox Openstack Team
Mellanox Technologies Ltd.
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