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Table Of Contents
VMXNET 3 A paravirtualized NIC designed for performance. VMXNET 3 offers all the
features available in VMXNET 2 and adds several new features, such as
multiqueue support (also known as Receive Side Scaling in Windows), IPv6
offloads, and MSI/MSI-X interrupt delivery. VMXNET 3 is not related to
VMXNET or VMXNET 2.
PVRDMA
A paravirtualized NIC that supports remote direct memory access (RDMA)
between virtual machines through the OFED verbs API. All virtual machines
must have a PVRDMA device and should be connected to a distributed
switch. PVRDMA supports VMware vSphere vMotion and snapshot
technology. It is available in virtual machines with hardware version 13 and
guest operating system Linux kernel 4.6 and later.
For information about assigning an PVRDMA network adapter to a virtual
machine, see the vSphere Networking documentation.
SR-IOV passthrough Representation of a virtual function (VF) on a physical NIC with SR-IOV
support. The virtual machine and the physical adapter exchange data
without using the VMkernel as an intermediary. This adapter type is suitable
for virtual machines where latency might cause failure or that require more
CPU resources.
SR-IOV passthrough is available in ESXi 6.0 and later for guest operating
systems Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and later, and Windows Server 2008
R2 with SP2. An operating system release might contain a default VF driver
for certain NICs, while for others you must download and install it from a
location provided by the vendor of the NIC or of the host.
For information about assigning an SR-IOV passthrough network adapter to
a virtual machine, see the vSphere Networking documentation.
For network adapter compatibility considerations, see the VMware Compatibility Guide at
http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility.
Legacy Network Adapters and ESXi Virtual Hardware Versions
The default network adapter types for all legacy virtual machines depend on the adapters available and
compatible to the guest operating system and the version of virtual hardware on which the virtual machine
was created.
If you do not upgrade a virtual machine to use a virtual hardware version, your adapter settings remain
unchanged. If you upgrade your virtual machine to take advantage of newer virtual hardware, your default
adapter settings will likely change to be compatible with the guest operating system and upgraded host
hardware.
To verify the network adapters that are available to your supported guest operating system for a particular
version of vSphere ESXi, see the VMware Compatibility Guide at
http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility.
vSphere Virtual Machine Administration
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