ConnectX-3 VF finally works in Windows guest on PVE!

I finally succeed in working a virtual function of ConnectX-3 SR-IOV on a Windows 10 Pro. guest on Proxmox VE 6.3!

Getting the device manager to recognise the VF was a piece of cake, but I struggled with an “Error code 43” problem even though I tried to install its driver over and over. As it turned out, the cause was that PVE's built-in PF driver was outdated indeed. I will write it down at a later date if time permits.

Let's just see a performance of SR-IOV!

As shown in above picture, two Windows 10 PCs were connected by ConnectX-3 via a Layer-3 switch, one of which was physical machine (left-side in the picture) and the another was virtual machine (right-side). Then I measured line speed using NTttcp which was a Microsoft's official tool. Sender was left-side machine, and receiver was right-side. The result is below:

There are four task manager in the picture, but the active task manager in the bottom right corner runs on the physical machine, the others do on the virtual machine. It turns out that the connection speeds up to about 26Gbps. When I tested it using virtio-net instead of the PF on the VM, it sped up to about 12Gbps in comparable terms. The SR-IOV works out lower CPU load even more than faster speed. Only the SR-IOV could do that!

I also found out it peaked up to about 32Gbps on a side note.