DirectPath I/O

[BearGolightly]

I currently have a marathon support case open and support's latest reply includes an internal-only link (I'm pretty sure), so I can't read it. 😞

The release notes for 7.0 specify: 

"High Availability (HA) Link Monitoring is only supported on VMware ESXi installations that support DirectPath I/O." 

This is the only mention of DirectPath in the entire 7.0 docs.

Does anyone care to share the secret DirectPath I/O recipe for those of us who have supported hardware?  I have a host that supports DirectPath I/O entirely and VMware shows DirectPath I/O as supported; I have successfully enabled DirectPath i/o and even assigned one of the adapters to passthrough (this validates, to me, that DirectPath I/O appears to be supported enough to make ESXi happy.)  

Since we have to keep vmxnet3 adapters in the host, I can't just add a PCI-E passthrough device to the host like I would expect, how does this work exactly?  http://i.imgur.com/DEfnmbE.gif

[BearGolightly]

Nobody?

[ggarrison]

BearGolightly,

I have double checked with our engineering team, and have confirmed that DirectPath I/O is in fact not supported with PA-VM series devices on ESXi.  As an alternative to link monitoring, we recommend configuring path monitoring instead.  We are working with our team to make sure that all documentation and references to DirectPath I/O are updated to reflect the correct information.  Please let me know if there's anything else I can help you with.