6.5.1

Table Of Contents
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 5.5 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.
Network Adapters and Legacy Virtual Machines
Legacy virtual machines are virtual machines that are supported by the product in use, but are not current
for that product. 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 correspond with an upgrade to a newer version of an ESXi
host, 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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