![]() 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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June 2023
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