Intel® QuickAssist Technology Driver for VMware ESXi with DirectPath I/O – Hardware Version 1.X

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

This article provides information about the Intel® QuickAssist Technology (Intel® QAT) Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) driver for VMware ESXi. SR-IOV enables the creation of Virtual Functions (VF) from a single Intel® QAT device to support acceleration for multiple virtual machines.

Resolution

Product Overview

Intel® QuickAssist Technology (Intel® QAT) accelerates cryptographic and compression workloads by offloading the data to hardware capable of optimizing those functions. Listed below are the supported Intel® QAT capabilities:

• Symmetric (Bulk) cryptography
• Asymmetric (Public Key) cryptography
• Compression/Decompression

Supported Intel Platforms:

• Intel® C62x Chipset (c6xx QAT)
• Intel® QuickAssist Adapter 8960/8970 (c6xx QAT)
• Intel® Xeon® D2700 processor product family (c4xxx QAT)
• Intel® Xeon® D1700 processor product family (200xx QAT)

Supported VMware Environment:

• Driver is compatible with on VMware ESXi 7.0 and 8.0.

Download

Intel® QuickAssist Technology Driver for VMware ESXi* – HW Version 1.X is available on the Intel’s Download Center.

Benefits of using Intel® QuickAssist Technology

There are several benefits to using Intel QAT. For example, it can be scaled by choosing accelerators with different performance characteristics or by employing multiple accelerators in a single platform. Another advantage is the reduction in software development efforts by implementing a consistent set of APIs that can be used across products and over multiple development cycles. The APIs also allow for optional supported features that can be queried at run-time, allowing the same software to run unmodified on different deployed platforms. In addition, the APIs are designed for portability being independent of the operating system and independent of user vs. kernel space. Memory is allocated by the calling application and provided to the API implementation through the API itself. For improved performance, the APIs can support both synchronous and asynchronous invocation modes. Flexible memory models are supported for data buffers to allow for zero-copy user space implementations. Many of the user space libraries supporting Intel® QAT can be found in the “Useful Links” section below.

Customer Support

The Intel® QAT driver supporting ESXi is provided under VMware’s Partner Verified and Supported Products (PVSP) program. Under the PVSP program, Intel acts as the primary contact for all Intel® QAT related issues. To submit an Intel® Premier Support (IPS) ticket, please go to https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/secure/my-intel/dashboard.html

VMware forwards all issues they suspect to be related to Intel® QAT to Intel to help triage and resolve with the customer directly.

Known Issues

Any known issues and limitations are listed in the release notes located here.

Useful Links

• Intel® QuickAssist Technology landing page
• Intel® QuickAssist Technology at Intel® Developer Zone
• Intel® QAT user space libraries
• Intel® QAT Engine for OpenSSL
• Intel® Multi-Buffer Crypto for IPsec
• Intel® IPP Cryptography
• QATZip – Intel® QAT primary compression library
• Intel® QAT - NGINX Async Patch
• Intel® QuickAssist Technology for Linux* - Getting Started Guide (HW 1.X)
• Intel® QuickAssist Technology for Linux* - Release Notes (HW 1.X)
• Intel® QuickAssist Technology for VMware* - Release Notes (HW 1.X)
• Intel® QuickAssist Technology for Windows* - Release Notes (HW 1.7)
• Intel® QuickAssist Technology - Programmer’s Guide (HW 1.X)

To get more information how Intel® QAT is being used in different use cases see:

• Scaling Acceleration Capacity from 5 to 50 Gbps and Beyond with Intel® QuickAssist Technology
• Accelerating Hadoop* Applications Using Intel® QuickAssist Technology
• Accelerating OpenSSL* Using Intel® QuickAssist Technology