Support for RDMA over iWarp in vSphere?

[IainBD]

Hi,

Our service provider is going to be migrating our vSphere infrastructure to new hardware and they are telling me that the iWarp on the Intel based network cards is supported for RDMA transfers under vSphere 6.7. I cannot find any information to confirm this. In fact, all I have been able to find is a number of statements that that vSphere only support RoCE for RDMA network communications.

Can anyone confirm the that vSphere 6.7 does support iWarp and possibly point me to some documentation to that supports the service provider's statement?

Thanks,

IainBD.

[blazilla]

Hi,

first of all: iWARP is a protocol that implements remote direct memory access (RDMA). vSphere 6.5 and later releases support RDMA over Converged Ethernet  (RoCE)  between virtual machines that have paravirtualized RDMA capable network adapters.

So I don't think that iWARP is something you should care about.

[IainBD]

So are you saying that this is not something I should care about because RDMA using iWarp will work with v6.7 and vRDMA, or that I shouldn't care about iWarp because it doesn't work with vRDMA? The network adapters support iWarp. not RoCE, and the vendor is telling us that RDMA with iWarp works fine. I cannot find any documentation to support the vendor's statement.

[blazilla]

With the release of vSphere 6.7, VMware now supports RDMA and iSER. With vSphere 6.7, VMware is only supporting RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet).

[IainBD]

Thank you. That was how I read the documentation as well. Just with the vendor being rather adamant that the iWarp adapters will work with v6.7, I wanted a second opinion before calling BS.