Input/output monitoring mechanism

A system for I/O monitoring and forwarding to monitor data being communicated before the data reaches the destination, the system comprising:

• a logic unit for intercepting I/O data comprising a services node enabled with a software service;
• a logic unit for I/O data transmission comprising a plurality of compute nodes enabled with a software service;
• and
• a logic unit for interconnecting the plurality of compute nodes comprising a PCIe interconnect;
• and
• a logic unit for connecting the plurality of compute nodes to the services node comprising a MR-IOV adapter.

A computer program product comprising a computer readable storage medium having a computer readable program, wherein the computer readable program when executed on a computer causes the computer to:

• assign at least one virtual function to a services node by a Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) interconnect and a multi-root I/O virtualization (MR-IOV) adapter during initialization;
• assign at least one virtual function (VF) to a plurality of compute nodes enabled with software services, by the PCIe interconnect and the MR-IOV adapter;
• enable an operating system (OS) running in a virtual machine hosted by a hypervisor on at least one of the plurality of compute nodes to access the virtual function (PCI pass-through) or letting the hypervisor control the virtual function directly and not passing it to the OS running in the virtual machine (without PCI pass-through);
• load a front-end driver corresponding to the virtual function by the OS running in the virtual machine or an OS running directly in the hardware (bare-metal OS) or hypervisor running on at least one of the plurality of compute nodes;
• load a back-end driver corresponding to the virtual function by the software services running on the services node;
• and
• bridge the virtual function assigned to at least one of the plurality of compute nodes with the virtual function assigned to the services node by the MR-IOV adapter.