vSphere supports SR-IOV in an environment with specific configuration only. Some features of vSphere are not functional when SR-IOV is enabled.
Supported Configurations
To use SR-IOV in vSphere, your environment must meet several configuration requirements.
Component | Requirements |
---|---|
Physical host |
|
Physical NIC |
|
PF driver in ESXi for the physical NIC |
|
Guest OS | Must be supported by the NIC on the installed ESXi release according to the technical documentation from the NIC vendor. |
VF driver in the guest OS |
|
To verify that your physical hosts and NICs are compatible with ESXi releases, see the VMware Compatibility Guide.
Availability of Features
The following features are not available for virtual machines configured with SR-IOV:
- vSphere vMotion
- Storage vMotion
- vShield
- NetFlow
- VXLAN Virtual Wire
- vSphere High Availability
- vSphere Fault Tolerance
- vSphere DRS
- vSphere DPM
- Virtual machine suspend and resume
- Virtual machine snapshots
- MAC-based VLAN for passthrough virtual functions
- Hot addition and removal of virtual devices, memory, and vCPU
- Participation in a cluster environment
- Network statistics for a virtual machine NIC using SR-IOV passthrough
Note: Attempts to enable or configure unsupported features with SR-IOV in the result in unexpected behavior in your environment.
Supported NICs
All NICs must have drivers and firmware that support SR-IOV. Some NICs might require SR-IOV to be enabled on the firmware. To learn what NICs are supported for virtual machines configured with SR-IOV, see the VMware Compatibility Guide.