Improving performance through VMDirectPath I/O

VMware vSphere DirectPath I/O leverages Intel VT-d and AMD-Vi hardware support to allow guest operating systems to directly access hardware devices. In the case of networking, vSphere DirectPath I/O allows the virtual machine to access a physical NIC directly rather than using an emulated device or a paravirtualized device. An example of an emulated device is the E 1000 virtual NIC, and examples of paravirtualized devices are the VMXNET and VMXNET 3 virtual network adapters. vSphere DirectPath I/O provides limited increases in throughput, but it reduces the CPU cost for networking intensive workloads.

vSphere DirectPath I/O is not compatible with certain core virtualization features. However, when you run ESXi on certain vendor configurations, vSphere DirectPath I/O for networking is compatible with the following:

• vSphere vMotion

• Hot adding and removing of virtual devices, suspend and resume

• VMware vSphere® high availability

• VMware vSphere® Distributed...