6.5.1

Table Of Contents
4 Select the network device to be used for passthrough and click OK.
The selected PCI device appears in the table. Device information is displayed at the bottom of the
screen.
5 Reboot the host to make the PCI network device available for use.
Configure a PCI Device on a Virtual Machine
Passthrough devices provide the means to more efficiently use resources and improve performance in
your environment. You can configure a passthrough PCI device on a virtual machine in the
vSphere Web Client.
When using passthrough devices with a Linux kernel version 2.6.20 or earlier, avoid MSI and MSI-X
modes because these modes have significant performance impact.
Prerequisites
Verify that a passthrough networking device is configured on the host of the virtual machine. See Enable
Passthrough for a Network Device on a Host.
Procedure
1 Locate the virtual machine in the vSphere Web Client.
a Select a data center, folder, cluster, resource pool, or host and click the VMs tab.
b Click Virtual Machines and double-click the virtual machine from the list.
2 Power off the virtual machine.
3 On the Configure tab of the virtual machine, expand Settings and select VM Hardware.
4 Click Edit and select the Virtual Hardware tab in the dialog box displaying the settings.
5 Expand the Memory section, and set the Limit to Unlimited.
6 From the New device drop-down menu select PCI Device and click Add.
7 From the New PCI device drop-down menu select the passthrough device to use, and click OK.
8 Power on the virtual machine.
Adding a DirectPath I/O device to a virtual machine sets memory reservation to the memory size of the
virtual machine.
Enable DirectPath I/O with vMotion on a Virtual Machine
You can enable DirectPath I/O with vMotion for virtual machines in a data center on a Cisco UCS system.
The system must have at least one supported Cisco UCS Virtual Machine Fabric Extender (VM-FEX)
distributed switch.
vSphere Networking
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