Intel® Dynamic Load Balancer Driver for VMware ESXi with VMDirectPath I/O - Hardware Version 2.0

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

The Intel® Dynamic Load Balancer (Intel® DLB) is a PCIe device that provides load balanced, prioritized scheduling of events across CPU cores enabling efficient core-to-core communication. It is a hardware accelerator integrated into the 4th Generation (formerly Sapphire Rapids) and 5th Generation (formerly Emerald Rapids) Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processor to improve performance and efficiency across the data center. This software enables single root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV) for the Intel® DLB on VMware ESXi. SR-IOV enables the creation of Virtual Functions (VFs) from a single Intel DLB Physical Function (PF) to support hardware acceleration for multiple guest Virtual Machines (VMs).

Please note this is not a standard ESXi I/O kernel driver. It is used with VMDirectPath I/O to access the device. VMware's certification of the Intel® DLB Driver 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:

• DLB 2.0 is only available with Sapphire Rapids and Emerald Rapids CPUs support.
• DLB 2.0 is only compatible with ESXi 7.0 U3i and later versions.

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 7.0.3
VMware vSphere ESXi 8.0.x

Resolution

Intel® Dynamic Load Balancer Driver for VMware ESXi is available on Intel® Download Center:

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/download/757792

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