About vNIOS Appliance for KVM

Infoblox vNIOS™ for KVM is a virtual appliance designed for KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) hypervisor deployments. The Infoblox vNIOS for KVM enables you to deploy large, robust, manageable, and cost effective Infoblox Grids. For information about Infoblox Grids, refer to the Infoblox NIOS Documentation. Note that vNIOS for KVM functions as a hardware virtual machine guest on the Linux system.

Infoblox NIOS provides core network services and a framework for integrating all the components of the modular Infoblox solution. NIOS provides integrated, secure, and easy-to-manage DNS (Domain Name System), DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) and IPAM (IP address management) services. In addition to DNS, DHCP, and IPAM, NIOS also provides TFTP, HTTP, and FTP file transfer services. Infoblox vNIOS for KVM Hypervisor provides most of the features supported by NIOS, with some limitations described in Known Limitations.

You can configure most of the vNIOS appliances as independent or HA (high availability) Grid Masters, Grid Master Candidates, and Grid members (or a reporting member). For supported vNIOS appliance models and their specifications, see vNIOS for KVM Virtual Appliance Models.

Note that the performance of a vNIOS VM instance deployed on a KVM host is impacted by the huge page sizes configured on the instance and on the host, and also by the services enabled on the instance.
Although, huge page sizes configured on the host and the VM instance are independent of each other, the following behavior is observed:

• When the host is configured to allocate huge pages to the instance, performance issues are reduced as it minimizes disk fragmentation, which otherwise has a significant impact on the performance. However, if the host is over provisioned with VM instances, performance of the VM will be impacted. To avoid it, refer to the best practices recommended by the Hypervisor.

• When the host is not configured to allocate huge pages to the instance, performance issues can elevate due to increased possibility of disk fragmentation, which often leads to non-contiguous physical memory blocks being allocated to the VM. In some cases, this may also lead to memory allocation failures.