vSphere 6.5 and later supports PVRDMA only in environments with a specific configuration.

Supported Configurations

To use PVRDMA in vSphere 6.5 or later, your environment must meet several configuration requirements.

Table 1. Supported Configurations for Using PVRDMA

Component	Requirements
vSphere	ESXi host 6.5 or later. vCenter Server 6.5 or later. vSphere Distributed Switch.
Physical host	Must be compatible with the ESXi release.
Host Channel Adapter (HCA)	Must be compatible with the ESXi release. Note: Virtual machines that reside on different ESXi hosts require HCA to use RDMA . You must assign the HCA as an uplink for the vSphere Distributed Switch. PVRDMA does not support NIC teaming. The HCA must be the only uplink on the vSphere Distributed Switch. For virtual machines on the same ESXi hosts or virtual machines using the TCP-based fallback, the HCA is not required.
Virtual machine	Virtual hardware version 13 or later.
Guest OS	Linux (64-bit)

To verify that your physical hosts and HCAs are compatible with ESXi releases, see the VMware Compatibility Guide.

Note: Attempts to enable or configure unsupported features with PVRDMA might result in unexpected behavior in your environment.

Support for PVRDMA Namespaces

In releases previous to vSphere 7.0, PVRDMA virtualized public resource identifiers in the underlying hardware to guarantee that a physical resource can be allocated with the same public identifier when a virtual machine resumed operation following the use of vMotion to move it from one physical host server to another. To do this, PVRDMA distributed virtual to physical resource identifier translations to peers when creating a resource. This resulted in additional overhead that can be significant when creating large numbers of resources.

PVRDMA namespaces prevents these additional overheads by letting multiple virtual machines coexist without coordinating the assignment of identifiers. Each virtual machine is assigned an isolated identifier namespace on the RDMA hardware, such that any virtual machine can select its identifiers within the same range without conflicting with other virtual machines. The physical resource identifier no longer changes even after vMotion, so virtual to physical resource identifier translations are no longer necessary.

PVRDMA namespaces are enabled automatically on vSphere 7.0 and later with virtual machine hardware version 17 or later. The underlying hardware must also support PVRDMA namespaces. To learn how to enable PVRDMA namespaces on your environment's hardware, refer to the RDMA vendor documentation.

Support for PVRDMA Native Endpoints

PVRDMA native endpoints are supported in virtual machine hardware version 18 and later beginning with vSphere 7.0 Update 1 and later releases. PVRDMA native endpoints allow PVRDMA to communicate with non-PVRDMA endpoints. To use PVRDMA native endpoints, you must enable PVRDMA namespaces. To learn how to enable PVRDMA namespaces on your environment's specific hardware, refer to the RDMA vendor documentation.

You must configure the virtual machine to use PVRDMA native endpoints. See Configure a Virtual Machine to Use PVRDMA Native Endpoints.