Network virtualization (SR-IOV) available on Virtualbox 6 ?

[falcon74]

Hi,

Searching around I see some posts talking of doing SR-IOV for VGA that "should work", but in a multi VM (per host) environment can the VM's benefit from network virtualization to save the hypervisor network layer overheads by direct access to host networking ? Can multiple VMs simultaneous use it simultaneously ?

Does it matter if host OS is Linux or Windows ?

cheers,
f74

[scottgus1]

Googling "SR-IOV for VGA" shows this is a distributed or virtual video card setup for physical devices, maybe VMs. https://www.reddit.com/r/VFIO/comments/ ... ptions_at/

Searching the pdf of the Virtualbox manual shows no results for 'IOV' so no SR-IOV for VGA. If this is something that can be installed on a PC to get it to use another PC's video card over the network, then it might be possible to install it in a Virtualbox guest. If this requires PCI passthrough, 6.1.x has removed PCI passthrough, and there was never any PCIe-passthrough.

can the VM's benefit from network virtualization to save the hypervisor network layer overheads by direct access to host networking

There is the 'Paravirtualized network adapter (virtio-net)' network card type that has a supposed faster performance. Drivers may be required in the guest.

[falcon74]

Thanks @scottgus1, especially for mentioning virtio-net. I had read about it earlier but forgotten. Reading around to see how it compares in performance and capabilities to SR-IOV, I found this interesting writeup:
https://www.juniper.net/documentation/e ... r-iov.html

So definitely virtio-net is not SR-IOV, but it is very useful and pertinent never the less. SR-IOV, I can understand is unlikely to be available on any desktop virtualization product, especially since most desktop (or laptop) NICs might not have requisite support needed, built-in.