The VMware HCG or “hardware compatibly guide” will list SR-IOV support in the “supported features” list for driver downloads.Īs you can see above, the latest driver for my SolarFlare SFN-7122F cards support SR-IOV. Not only the hardware/firmware support for SR-IOV, but also an ESXi driver that supports it. Secondly, you need to have an SR-IOV capable network card. Most server grade CPUs that were made in the last seven or eight years should be fine. The feature must also be enabled in the BIOS – often it’s disabled by default. You need a CPU that supports Intel VT-d or AMD-Vi. First, you’ve got meet the same set of basic requirements for PCI passthrough. To make this possible, there are several requirements. For example, a single 10Gbps NIC could be ‘passed through’ to a couple of virtual machines for direct access, and at the same time it could be attached to a vSwitch being used by other VMs with virtual NICs and vmkernel ports too. It can be shared between multiple virtual machines, or even shared between virtual machines and the hypervisor itself. Rather than granting exclusive use of the device to a single virtual machine, the device is shared or ‘partitioned’. SR-IOV takes PCI passthrough to the next level. And when I say direct, I mean direct – the guest OS communicates with the PCI device via IOMMU and the hypervisor completely ignores the card.” In a nutshell, PCI passthrough allows you to give a virtual machine direct access to a PCI device on the host. For passthrough to work, you’ll need an Intel processor supporting VT-d or an AMD processor supporting AMD-Vi as well as a motherboard that can support this feature. It was originally introduced back in vSphere 4.0 after Intel and AMD introduced the necessary IOMMU processor extensions to make this possible. “PCI Passthrough – or VMDirectPath I/O as VMware calls it – is not at all a new feature. Here is a quote from a post I did a few years ago: In order to understand SR-IOV, it helps to understand how PCI passthrough works. This may sound a lot like what a virtual NIC and a vSwitch does, but the feature works very similarly to PCI passthrough, granting a VM direct access to the NIC hardware. SR-IOV or “Single Root I/O Virtualization” is a very interesting feature that can provide virtual machines shared access to physical network cards installed in the hypervisor.
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