Intel® vRAN Baseband Driver and Tools for VMware ESXi - Intel® vRAN Boost 1.0

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

The Intel® vRAN Boost 1.0 is a PCIe device that provides 4G and 5G Forward Error Correction (FEC) and Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) acceleration in virtualized Radio Access Network (vRAN). It is a hardware accelerator integrated into the 4th Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable Edge Enhanced Processor. This software enables single root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV) for this device on VMware ESXi. SR-IOV enables the creation of Virtual Functions (VFs) from a single Physical Function (PF) to support hardware acceleration for multiple guest Virtual Machines (VMs).

Please note this is not a standard ESXi IO kernel driver.  It is used with VMDirectPath IO to access the device. VMware's certification of the Intel® vRAN Baseband Driver and Tools verifies basic platform and device requirements for VMDirectPath I/O, checking that the PF driver enables VFs correctly and that the VFs are exposed to the VM's guest operating system, and this functionality is the limit to VMware's support. The VMDirectPath I/O certification for SR-IOV test suite does not certify end-to-end functionality of the device. It is Intel's responsibility to support end users with end-to-end interoperability and functionality of the overall solution.

Note:

• vRAN Boost 1.0 is only available with Sapphire Rapids Edge Enhanced CPU support.
• vRAN Boost 1.0 software is intended to be used with ESXi 8.0U1 and later versions.

Resolution

Intel® vRAN Baseband Driver and Tools for VMware ESXi are available on Intel® Download Center:
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/download/19758

Customer Support

To submit an Intel® Premier Support (IPS) ticket, please go to https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/secure/my-intel/dashboard.html