I was excited to have one of our partners, Mellanox, extend a special invitation for me to speak at their Expo booth during VMworld 2012 in San Francisco. They had allocated a 30 minute slot for a Theater Presentation and promoted my presentation via nice giveaways and postcards distributed in nearby VMworld hotels. I used this opportunity to reiterate some of the messages from the OpenFabrics Alliance Workshop in Monterey in March 2012 and to report on further progress with the Office of the CTO’s explorations into supporting RDMA at various levels in the vSphere ESXi hypervisor. In the first section of the presentation, I highlighted various use cases for RDMA...
Bhavesh Davda
Senior Engineer, Office of CTO
Biography
Bhavesh Davda is a senior engineer in the CTO Office at VMware. He is focused on enabling virtualization of real-time applications, low latency applications, high rate packet processing, high performance computing, SR-IOV and RDMA, which have historically been challenging to virtualize. Previously, he managed the vSphere Networking R&D team, where the team worked on the entire virtual networking stack from guest OS drivers for paravirtual NICs, to virtualization of paravirtual and emulated NICs in the hypervisor, to efficiently implementing I/O down to the physical NIC drivers and the TCP/IP stack in the vmkernel hypervisor for uses like VMotion, Fault-Tolerance and NFS at the hypervisor level.Bhavesh has over 17 years of experience in the systems software field. Before VMware, he was a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at Avaya Labs in the operating systems group of their flagship Enterprise Communications Manager product.
Posts by Bhavesh Davda
Summer of vRDMA
Last summer, Josh Simons wrote a blog entry titled Summer of RDMA , summarizing work done by our intern, Adit Ranadive , who looked at RDMA performance on ESXi using VM DirectPath I/O with QDR InfiniBand cards passed through to VMs. At the same time, I had been exploring how to exploit RDMA for accelerating ESXi hypervisor services like vMotion, and some ideas around how to enable RDMA within a guest while still maintaining the ability to vMotion such VMs. In March 2012, Josh Simons and I delivered a talk about RDMA on vSphere: Status and Future Directions . In the talk, I discussed several different altenatives to expose...
Network I/O Latency on vSphere 5.0
In a recent blog post, I offered Tuning tips to run low-latency applications in virtual machines . The blog post and the Best Practices white paper highlighted that by following certain tuning tips, a broad array of I/O latency sensitive applications which were historically difficult to virtualize due to overheads and added latency can now be successfully deployed on VMware vSphere 5.0. I’m excited to annouce that my colleage Shilpi Agarwal, who manages the vSphere Network Performance Engineering team, just published a companion white paper that examines Network I/O Latency on VMware vSphere 5 . The paper is an excellent and highly recommended read to learn about the exact sources of latency overhead in the vSphere...
Tuning tips to run low-latency applications in virtual machines
First off, a little bit about myself. I’m Bhavesh Davda, presently a member of the Office of the CTO here at VMware, looking at areas like low latency applications, high rate packet processing, high performance computing, SR-IOV and RDMA, which have historically been challenging to virtualize. Until recently, I managed the vSphere Networking R&D team within VMware, where my team worked on the entire virtual networking stack from guest OS drivers for paravirtual NICs, to virtualization of paravirtual and emulated NICs in the hypervisor, to efficiently implementing I/O down to the physical NIC drivers and our own TCP/IP stack in the vmkernel hypervisor for uses like VMotion, Fault-Tolerance and NFS at the hypervisor level. For the longest time, it was unusual to hear the...
