Using VMDq in a non-virtualised environment

[kelvin_proctor]

Hi Folks,

I hope this is an appropriate forum to post this question to.

I have some systems in the electrical distribution world where I'm trying to simulate many 00's of devices that all talk IEC-61850 for Smart Grid simulations etc.... The IEC-61850 protocols are a mix of IP and a seperate ethernet protocol (seperate ethertype) for high speed inter-device messaging.

I was planning to write a NDIS MUX driver and use that to create 00s of virtualised NICs each with their own MAC address and IP address etc... I presume this is exactly what VMWare etc.. are doing. I anticipated that to get this to work I would need to put the NIC this was bound onto into promiscous mode and then handle interesting cases such as broadcast frames (to be delivered to all virtual NICs) and messages between virtual NICs (routed internally, never go down to real NIC). I also guess that in many-core systems this MUX driver was likely to be a very significant bottleneck on system performance.

I've just recently learnt about VMDq and I'm now wondering if I can use this to increase the performance of the proposed solution?

I'm fairly new to Windows NDIS development so sorry if these questions seem silly.

I'll still need to write an NDIS MUX driver but I'm wondering how I would interface with a VMDq enabled adapter through NDIS?

How would I detect that the adapter I was binding to was VMDq enabled?

Any hints on using VMDq through NDIS would be very much appreicated.

Regards,

Kelvin

[Anthony_B_Intel]

Microsoft's support for VMDq is called "VMQ" and is available in Windows Server 2008 R2 as part of the Hyper-V facility. There's a quick glossy on VMDq and VMQ available here.

I would try to get a sense of how the VMQ interface works and then try to design something along the same lines for your non-virtualized environment. By reading up on VMQ, you may be able to get a sense of what design decisions they made and why and get a sense for how they manage their VMDq devices.

[Roger_H_Intel]

I am told that a monitor watches http://communities.intel.com/community/wired, and that they should be able to point you to appropriate docs. Let us know. Thanks