I’m looking to have VMs with decent graphical performance with the ability to run programs like Adobe Photoshop and a desktop environment that doesn’t stutter, nothing too crazy, there will be no video editing or 3D rendering in this VM, just light graphics work.
My first thought was to pass through the iGPU to the VM and call it a night but then I remembered the concept of vGPUs and how apparently Intel took the opposite approach to NVIDIA in allowing their graphics units to be divvied up between machines on consumer hardware and figured “why should I allocate all my graphical ability if I can more efficiently use it?”
So I started to look into it and apparently this was achieved through GVT-g, except that it doesn’t apply for anything after 9th gen Intel processors (source), instead, being replaced by SR-IOV.
This particular line caught my attention
SR-IOV (Single Root IO Virtualization) is supported only on platforms with 11th Generation Intel® Core™ “G” Processors (products formerly known as Tiger Lake or newer.
So I ran to Intel ARK and pulled up the specification for the 11900K (source) sitting inside my computer and was disheartened that it was a UHD variant, not an Xe variant and that I’m SOL… or so I thought, additional reading reveals that the UHD Graphics 750 is based on the Xe architecture and explicitly mentions the 11900K (source)
So then I ran towards ESXi and after some casual reading, checked to see if I could just enable SR-IOV just like that…
I could not… so I figured perhaps my motherboard doesn’t support it or it’s disabled in the BIOS but before rebooting my server, I scrolled down and found that I could in fact configure SR-IOV on my 10GbE NICs
I remember when I needed to passthrough the SATA controller to the TrueNAS VM, it was listed as “not capable”, which was less to do with actual capability and more to do with the IDs not being whitelisted and with a little bit of bypass (source), that controller became “capable” and I passed it to my TrueNAS VM.
Is there something similar going on with SR-IOV? How do I force ESXi to recognize a device’s SR-IOV capabilities?