PCI Passthrough Ethernet Interfaces

A passthrough Ethernet interface is a physical PCI Ethernet NIC on a compute node to which a virtual machine is granted direct access.

This minimizes packet processing delays but at the same time demands special operational considerations.

For all purposes, a PCI passthrough interface behaves as if it were physically attached to the virtual machine. Therefore, any potential throughput limitations coming from the virtualized environment, such as the ones introduced by internal copying of data buffers, are eliminated. However, by bypassing the virtualized environment, the use of PCI passthrough Ethernet devices introduces several restrictions that you must take into consideration. They include:

• no support for LAG, QoS, ACL, or host interface monitoring

• no support for live migration