Unable to boot VM after attaching PCI device NVIDIA GPU card

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

• Virtual machine power on failure when  PCI device with NVIDIA GPU card is enabled.
• PCI Passthru is enabled on VM level
• While powering on the UI , it gives the error "Insufficient resources. One or more devices (pciPassthru0) required by VM"

/var/run/log/hostd.log

YYYY-MM-YYTHH:MM:SS.000Z Db(###) Hostd[#####] [Originator@6876 sub=Vigor.Vmsvc.vm:/vmfs/volumes/687a##-#####-####-########/VMNAME_FOLDER/VMNAME
01.vmx] Power On translated error to vim.fault.InsufficientGraphicsResourcesFault
YYYY-MM-YYTHH:MM:SS.000Z Db(###) Hostd[#####] [Originator@6876 sub=Vigor.Vmsvc.vm:/vmfs/volumes/687a##-#####-####-########/VMNAME_FOLDER/VMNAME.vmx] Power On message: No graphics device is available for vGPU '<vGPU profile name>'.
YYYY-MM-YYTHH:MM:SS.000Z Db(###) Hostd[#####] --> Module 'DevicePowerOnEarly' power on failed.
YYYY-MM-YYTHH:MM:SS.000Z Db(###) Hostd[#####] --> Failed to start the virtual machine.
YYYY-MM-YYTHH:MM:SS.000Z Db(###) Hostd[#####] -->

 

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 7.x

VMware vSphere ESXi 8.x

Cause

SR-IOV setting in BIOS was disabled

Resolution

• SR-IOV needs to be enabled on BIOS on the ESXi host to allow PCI passthrough. Please Refer Enabling SR-IOV on physical Servers
• SR-IOV (Single Root I/O Virtualization) in ESXi allows a single physical PCIe device to be presented as multiple virtual devices to virtual machines, improving networking performance by enabling direct hardware access. This means VMs can bypass the hypervisor's virtual switch for network traffic, reducing latency and increasing throughput

     

 

Additional Information

    Reference Configure a Virtual Machine to Use SR-IOV