SR-IOV feature enhancements in VMware vSphere ESXi 5.5

Feature category

vSphere ESXi 5.1GA

vSphere ESXi 5.5 GA

Enhancement

N/A

In vSphere 5.5, though a virtual switch (standard and distributed switch) does not handle the network traffic of an SR-IOV enabled virtual machine connected to the switch , you can control the assigned virtual functions by using switch configuration policies at port group or port level.

Supported configuration

Host with AMD processors are NOT supported with SR-IOV.

Host with AMD processors are supported with SR-IOV.

Enabling SR-IOV on ESXi Host

Use max_vfsparameter of the NIC driver module to enable SR-IOV in tech support mode.

Use vSphere Web Client to enable SR-IOV.

Upgrading from vSphere 5.1

N/A

Although SR-IOV is supported on ESXi 5.1, cannot configure SR-IOV on them using the vSphere Web Client.

Networking Options

N/A

We can configure certain networking features (MTU size, Security policy for VF traffic, VLAN tagging mode) for a virtual machine adapter that uses a VF.

Handle VM traffic

Physical function (PF) of an SR-IOV capable physical adapter cannot be configured to handle virtual machine traffic.

Both the physical function (PF) and virtual functions (VFs) of an SR-IOV capable physical adapter can be configured to handle virtual machine traffic.

Configuration Maximum

SR-IOV virtual functions per host – 32

SR-IOV supported 10G pNICs - 4

SR-IOV virtual functions per host – 64

SR-IOV supported 10G pNICs - 8