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 The SR-IOV technology enables splitting a single physical adapter (physical function) into several virtual adapters (virtual functions). Each virtual function appears as a separate PCI device that can be attached to multiple virtual machines.
• host bus adapters

To attach a physical PCI device to a virtual machine, follow these steps:

1. Prepare compute nodes for PCI passthrough.
2. Reconfigure the compute cluster to enable PCI passthrough.
3. Create virtual machines with attached PCI devices.