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Multus and SR-IOV

Multus​

Multus CNI is a CNI Plugin that enables attaching multiple network interfaces to pods. Multus does not replace Cilium CNI, instead it acts as a CNI Plugin multiplexer. Multus is useful in certain use cases, especially when pods are network intensive and require extra network interfaces that support dataplane acceleration techniques such as SR-IOV.

Using Multus with SR-IOV​

Using the SR-IOV CNI with Multus can help with data-plane acceleration use cases, providing an extra interface in the pod that can achieve very high throughput. SR-IOV will not work in all environments, and there are several requirements that must be fulfilled to consider the node as SR-IOV capable:

  • Physical NIC must support SR-IOV (e.g. by checking /sys/class/net/$NIC/device/sriov_totalvfs)