A standard allowing a single PCIe device to present itself as multiple virtual functions, each seen as its own device by the hypervisor or guest. Large numbers of these can exhaust a host's interrupt vectors.
Also called Single Root I/O Virtualization.
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In the Ultra Transcenders books
Each book explains SR-IOV in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.
Terms in this definition
- Standard deployment type
A Foundry deployment type billed per token that keeps processing of prompts and responses inside the Azure geography of the resource, meeting data residency needs at lower volumes.
- PCIe
Bus standard used by NVMe drives, GPUs and similar cards. With Discrete Device Assignment, one VM gets an entire such device to itself.
- Hypervisor
The virtualisation software allowing many isolated virtual machines to run on a single physical server. The cloud provider looks after it whichever service type is used.
Related terms
- Accelerated Networking
SR-IOV capability that cuts latency, jitter and CPU overhead for VM networking in Azure. HPC VM sizes with RDMA achieve even lower latency.
- GPU partitioning
A Hyper-V capability that lets several virtual machines share one physical graphics card through SR-IOV. Windows Server 2025 added live migration for virtual machines with GPU partitions.