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ABB - SSC600 SW

ABB - SSC600 SW

Requirements

To run the SSC600 SW VM in SEAPATH, the SSC600 SW package has to be downloaded from the ABB website. A license is also needed to run the software. Find more information in the dedicated webpage.

Deploy the VMs

A template xml ssc600.xml.j2 is provided in the ansible repository. There is also example inventories in the inventory/provider/abb directory.

The following variables configure the template:

Variable

Required

Type

Comments

Variable

Required

Type

Comments

description

No

String

 

uuid

No

Int

 

cpuset

Yes

Array of int

A minimum of 4 CPUs is required

memory

No

Int

(GiB). The default and minimum required is 6

emulatorpin

Yes

Int

 

vm_disk

Yes

String

The disk image can be in raw or in qcow2. More information in the disk section.

bridges

No

Dict

name (String) and mac_address (String) must be defined. In competition with ovs bridge. Use for the rear interface in the VM.

process_bus_interfaces

No

Array of dict

name (String), mac_address (String) and mode (String) must be defined.

protection_ports

No

Dict

The interface PCI address used for SVs.

domain
bus
slot
function

Disk

The VM can be deployed in two format:

  • gzipped raw disk (default from ABB)

    • vm_disk: link to the img.gz from the SSC600 SW package. Must be extracted and converted to qcow2 format using qemu-img. Refer to qemu documentation.)

Hypervisor configuration

Following the ABB documentation about the SSC600 SW, some configurations are required to improve the global performance.

  • A minimum of 4 isolated CPUs in a RT kernel is needed. More information in Real time virtual machine configuration

  • Hugepages should be enabled. For a 6GiB dedicated memory, 6 pages of 1GiB must be reserved.

    • This can be done with the following variable in the inventory grub_append: "default_hugepagesz=1G hugepagesz=1G hugepages=6"

  • The PTP is passed using ptp_kvm and the ptp status is reported to the VM using a vsock. The ptp_interface must be declared in the inventory. More information in Time synchronization configuration .

  • The NIC affinity can be configured in the nic_affinity variable.

  • A qemu hook is provided in the ABB package, this sould be added in each hypervisor using the upload_files variable.

Tested configuration

The VM has been tested in the following SEAPATH configuration:

  • Yocto SEAPATH standalone

  • Debian SEAPATH standalone

  • Debian SEAPATH cluster (3 hypervisors)

  • Yocto SEAPATH cluster (3 hypervisors)

Not yet supported

  • The live migration cannot be done due to macvtap / PCI pass-through configuration. It isn't supported by qemu for now.

  • The L3 cache partionning asked in the ABB documentation is not yet implemented and will require test to check the impact in SEAPATH.