VMware includes a virtual networking infrastructure. The virtual networking, consisting of virtual machine ports and Virtual Switches, runs in ESXi–the hypervisor. VMware virtual ports and switches support VLANs that adhere to industry standards. A virtual machine can be configured with one or more virtual Ethernet adapters, each having its own MAC and IP address. Essentially, virtual machines have the same properties as physical machines from a networking viewpoint.
VM DirectPath I/O is a VMware technology that can be used by virtual machines to directly access the underlying hardware, bypassing the hypervisor. This is a big performance improvement for virtual machines that are doing a lot of I/O processing. Some virtual machine functions get disabled when using this setting, such as memory overcommitment and page sharing, so be careful when configuring it.
VMware vSphere DirectPath I/O (DPIO) is a vSphere feature that takes advantage of VT enabled...