To enable this, find the host BIOS setting for “above 4G decoding” or “memory mapped I/O above 4GB” or “PCI 64 bit resource handing above 4G” and enable it. Your host BIOS must be configured to support the large memory regions needed by these high-end PCI devices. You should follow the instructions in this article to enable them for use in passthrough mode within a virtual machine. As a general rule, cards that require more than 16GB of memory mapping are high end cards. For these cards, simply follow the published instructions to enable passthrough devices under vSphere. Devices for which these instructions should not be necessary include the Nvidia K40c, K2, K20m, and AMD FirePro W9100, S7150x2. Devices in this class include the Nvidia K40m, K80, P100, and V100 Intel Xeon Phi and some FPGA cards. This article is only relevant if your PCI device maps memory regions whose sizes total more than 16GB. Note that while VMware supports VM Direct Path I/O (passthrough) as an ESXi feature and a device listed here may work correctly in passthrough mode, you should contact your device/system vendor if you require a formal statement of support for a particular device model. This section describes all of these requirements. To enable Nvidia V100 GPU for passthrough your host BIOS must be configured correctly, and the virtual machine destined to run these accelerated workloads must meet specific requirements as well. In addition, performance results are presented to demonstrate that V100 GPU in passthrough mode can achieve very close performance to bare-metal. This blog is an update of Josh Simons’ previous blog “ How to Enable Compute Accelerators on vSphere 6.5 for Machine Learning and Other HPC Workloads”, and explains how to enable Nvidia V100 GPU, which comes with a larger PCI BARs (Base Address Registers) than previous GPU models, in Passthrough mode on vSphere 6.0 p4 and beyond.

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