"Enable VFs failed for device", SRIOV failure on HPE ARM Host.

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

• Enabling SRIOV fails on HPE ARM Host and ESX logs shows the error messages as below:
  
  /var/run/log/vmkwarning.log

YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS.###Z -WARNING vmkwarning - [esx@4413] cpu42:1001391136) PCI: EnableVFs:1617: Enable VFs failed for device @0002:01:00.0, Please make sure the system has proper BIOS installed and enabled for SRIOV.

Environment

• VMware ESX 9.1.
• HPE RL300 Gen11 Ampere Altra server.

Resolution

This is an expected behaviour on HPE ARM Hosts as HPE does not support SRIOV feature yet on ARM server.