SR-IOV

Both slice one NIC into many. SR-IOV carves PCI devices in silicon; macvlan stacks netdevs in the kernel. Labbed side by side on the same node: 57.8 Gb/s that costs a full CPU core, isolation modes that mirror IB partitions, and the two absences that decide it.

A hands-on walkthrough of InfiniBand multi-tenancy on real hardware: one ConnectX-6 port split into four SR-IOV virtual functions, five VMs sorted into two P_Key partitions, and the isolation proven on the wire with packet captures and hardware state.