Applications running in virtual machines hosted on vSphere can make use of GPU processing power in two ways.

vSphere DirectPath I/O is a vSphere inherent feature that leverages virtualization technology (VT)-enabled processors configured to the hosts to enhance the performance of virtual machines. General purpose Input Output (GPIO) is a processor feature of Intel/AMD CPUs known as an I/O memory management unit that assigns direct memory access transfers and device interrupts. This way, virtual machines are able to bypass the VMkernel and get direct access to the underlying physical hardware. vMotion is supported with DPIO-enabled server hardware.

Hardware-assisted I/O MMU virtualization is called Intel Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O (VT-d) in Intel processors and AMD I/O Virtualization (AMD-Vi or IOMMU) in AMD processors. It is a function of the...