Third Party Virtual Machine

The Extreme Integrated Application Hosting (IAH) feature supports the pre-installed Third Party Virtual Machine (TPVM). For switches that use a modular Solid State Drive (SSD) for IAH , the virtual machine is pre-installed on the modular SSD. For switches that do not use a modular Solid State Drive (SSD) for IAH , the virtual machine is pre-installed on the switch.

You can use the show virtual-service config command to view the information about the pre-installed virtual machine on the switch. For more information, see Display Virtual Service Configuration.

Important

Important

You must upgrade virtual services independently of a VOSS upgrade; separate images for virtual services are available. For more information, see Upgrade a Virtual Service.

For more information about how to configure virtual services, see Virtual Services Configuration using CLI and Virtual Services Configuration using EDM.

Third Party Virtual Machine (TPVM) provides a set of troubleshooting tools on the switch. The following installed packages are available on TPVM:
  • build-essential

  • checkinstall

  • iperf

  • mtools

  • netperf

  • qemu-guest-agent

  • tshark

  • valgrind

  • vim-gnome

  • wireshark

  • xterm

Important

Important

TPVM includes an administrator account with a default username and password. To ensure security, you must change the default password when you access TPVM for the first time, before enabling the IAH ports using the no shutdown command. The software automatically prompts you to change this password at first boot; no action can be taken with the VM until you change the password.

The following user applications are available on TPVM:

Note

Note

If you start the console for TPVM without network connectivity to a DHCP server, the VM remains in a retry loop for approximately 5 minutes while it tries to obtain a DHCP address. The system displays the following message: [FAILED] Failed to start Raise network interfaces, and then the VM continues to boot. The VM does start but with the virtual port, eth0, in the administratively down state.

The following are the virtual services resources for TPVM:

Important

Important

To enable SR-IOV and VT-d, the guest OS must have Ethernet drivers (ixgbe) that support these Intel technologies. These drivers are not available by default in many OS distribution versions. The TPVM version based on Ubuntu 16.04 is enhanced to include updated driver versions to support SR-IOV and VT-d. If you upgrade the TPVM guest OS kernel, you override these drivers and the VM does not support SR-IOV or VT-d vport connection types.

Do not perform a kernel upgrade from within the TPVM. If necessary, you can upgrade individual packages. You can upgrade to Ubuntu 18.04, which includes support for these new driver versions by default.