TPVM (Third-Party Virtual Machine) is a general server that resides on some Extreme SLX devices. When EFA is deployed on a TPVM, no other applications can be run on that TPVM.
In a TPVM deployment, EFA is a microservice-based fabric automation engine that leverages the K3S Kubernetes cluster as an underlying infrastructure for the EFA services deployment. You can install or upgrade the EFA application on a TPVM with one SLX command.
The EFA application binary is shipped with the SLX devices, along with the binaries for SLX-OS and the TPVM. Decoupling EFA from SLX-OS allows for upgrades to EFA without a need to upgrade SLX-OS or the TPVM. EFA can be deployed on one of the SLX devices in the fabric to manage the fabric.
EFA on TPVM is supported only on the platforms described in Supported Platforms and Deployment Models.
The EFA package can be found under the /efaboot folder on the SLX device. For an incremental EFA image upgrade, you can copy the EFA tar file to the /efaboot directory on the SLX device before the deployment.
TPVM must be installed and running on the SLX device. You can accomplish these tasks by running the tpvm deploy command on the SLX device.
tpvm deploy mgmt [dhcp/ipaddr] [gw] admin-pwd allow-pwdless confirm-pwd
See the Extreme SLX-OS Command Reference for specific information about using this command.
You can install EFA on TPVM in a single-node deployment or in a multi-node deployment for high availability. For more information, see Install EFA on TPVM in a Single-Node Deployment and Install EFA on TPVM for High Availability.