Attaching physical PCI devices to virtual machines
By attaching various PCI devices from compute nodes to virtual machines, you can reduce VM network latency or accelerate visualization inside a guest operating system. PCI device passthrough is available only on servers that support Input/Output Memory Management Unit (IOMMU). For a list of IOMMU-supporting hardware, refer to this article.
You can attach the following PCI devices:
- physical GPU cards
- network adapters with Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) capabilities1
- host bus adapters
To attach a physical PCI device to a virtual machine, follow these steps:
Steps for HBA passthrough are similar to those for GPU passthrough.
- Prepare compute nodes for PCI passthrough.
- Reconfigure the compute cluster to enable PCI passthrough.
- Create virtual machines with attached PCI devices.