Intel® Data Center Graphics Driver for VMware ESXi with Enhanced DirectPath I/O - Intel® Data Center GPU Flex Series

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi 8.0

Issue/Introduction

• The Intel® Data Center GPU Flex 140 and Intel® Data Center GPU Flex 170 are PCIe discrete graphics products designed to deliver GPU-accelerated graphics and media functionality to end users.
• This software utilizes Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) technology in conjunction with VMware vSphere Enhanced Direct Path I/O to distribute the execution time of a single Physical Function (PF) GPU among multiple Virtual Function (VF)-based Virtual Devices (VDEVs), thereby offering graphics acceleration to workloads running in Virtual Machines (VMs).
• In addition, it enables VMware vSphere vMotion to live migrate VMs with GPU workloads from one server to another. Please note this is not a standard ESXi I/O kernel driver. It is used with Enhanced Direct Path I/O to access the device.
• VMware's certification of the Intel® Data Center GPU Driver verifies basic platform and device requirements for Enhanced Direct Path I/O, checking that the driver enables VDEVs correctly, exposes them to the VM's guest operating system, and provides VM live migration across hosts.
• The Enhanced Direct Path I/O certification test suite does not certify end-to-end functionality of the device.
• Intel will be supporting end users with end-to-end interoperability and functionality of the overall solution. 

Resolution

• To download Intel® Data Center Graphics Driver and Tools for VMware ESXi you can refer Intel® Download Center: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/download/786751
• Engage Intel® if you need any support on implementation or other issues via IPS tickets.