VxRail: Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) Support

Summary: What is VxRail Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) Support?

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Instructions

SR-IOV is a specification that allows a Single Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) physical device under a single root port to appear as multiple separate physical devices to the hypervisor or the guest operating system.

This feature is enabled by default in the Dell 13G & 14G BIOS, however, it is unsupported by VxRail at the vSphere level.

The main use case for SR-IOV is to pass-through the NIC on the node to a virtual machine (VM) and enable SR-IOV at the guest OS level.

Once this is enabled, you can no longer vMotion the VM off the node, which causes VxRail Upgrades to fail, as the node fails to enter Maintenance Mode.
If a customer has SR-IOV enabled within VMs on the cluster, these VMs must be powered down for VxRail node upgrade to complete successfully.
 
The following features are not available for virtual machines configured with SR-IOV:

  • vSphere vMotion
  • Storage vMotion
  • vShield
  • NetFlow
  • VXLAN Virtual Wire
  • vSphere High Availability
  • vSphere Fault Tolerance
  • vSphere DRS
  • vSphere DPM
  • Virtual machines suspend and resume
  • Virtual machine snapshots
  • MAC-based VLAN for passthrough virtual functions
  • Hot addition and removal of virtual devices, memory, and vCPU
  • Participation in a cluster environment
  • Network statistics for a virtual machine NIC using SR-IOV passthrough

Affected Products

VxRail Software
Article Properties
Article Number: 000048938
Article Type: How To
Last Modified: 11 Jun 2025
Version:  4
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