Unable to see SRIOV network card for the VM

Products

• VMware vSphere ESX 8.x

Issue/Introduction

Unable to see SRIOV network card as an option while trying to add network adapter to the VM.

• From the Actions menu of virtual machine, select Edit Settings.
• Select the Virtual Hardware tab in the dialog box displaying the settings.
• From the Add new device drop-down menu, select Network Adapter.
• The New Network section is added to the list in the Virtual Hardware tab.
• From the Adapter type drop-down menu, unable to see SR-IOV passthrough.

From the logs, we will see below entries:

2025-08-26T05:52:40.073Z Wa(180) vmkwarning: cpu29:2097740)WARNING: PCI: 909: 0000:3b:00.1: unable to allocate 0x800000 bytes in prefetch mmio VF-BAR[0]
2025-08-26T05:52:40.073Z In(182) vmkernel: cpu29:2097740)PCI: 343: 0000:3a:00.0 P2P bridge resources:
2025-08-26T05:52:40.073Z In(182) vmkernel: cpu29:2097740)PCI: 345:   IO: 0x0 - 0x0
2025-08-26T05:52:40.073Z In(182) vmkernel: cpu29:2097740)PCI: 346:   Mem: 0x0 - 0x0
2025-08-26T05:52:40.073Z In(182) vmkernel: cpu29:2097740)PCI: 347:   PrefetchMem: 0xac000000 - 0xafffffff
2025-08-26T05:52:40.073Z In(182) vmkernel: cpu29:2097740)PCI: 995: Failed to allocate and program VF BARs on 0000:3b:00.1
2025-08-26T05:52:40.073Z Wa(180) vmkwarning: cpu29:2097740)WARNING: PCI: 1615: Enable VFs failed for device @0000:3b:00.1, Please make sure the system has proper BIOS installed and enabled for SRIOV.

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi

Cause

This issue can occur when the SRIOV is not enabled on the BIOS level.

Resolution

Please check with your hardware vendor and enable SRIOV on BIOS level.