Using infiniband for openstack network communications

Dan Sneddon dsneddon at redhat.com
Wed Jun 8 02:43:21 UTC 2022


On 6/5/22 06:15, A Monster wrote:
> Is it possible to use the infiniband port for openstack networks without
> having to use the infiniband port as an ethernet port ?

In theory you could use Infiniband with IPoIB for API/RPC control plane,
and possibly for tenant virtual networks using VXLAN. I think you must
use Ethernet mode for provider networks or external provider networks,
but I could be mistaken.

As of Stein it was not possible to use Infiniband for bare metal nodes
using Ironic [0] with DHCP and PXE boot. There may have been additional
work done since, however I never saw completion of the dependencies to
make this work, but it might be possible using config-drive rather than
PXE boot and DHCP.

I have worked with Mellanox to use some Infiniband-capable NICs
(MLX-ConnectX-5) with ML2/OVS, but only in Ethernet mode. These cards
can also be used with DPDK using the "mlx5_core" driver.

-- 
Dan Sneddon         |  Senior Principal Software Engineer
dsneddon at redhat.com |  redhat.com/cloud
dsneddon:irc        |  @dxs:twitter




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