How to enable SR-IOV on AWS instances?

Single root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV) is used by AWS to provide high-performance networking capabilities. This feature is only available on certain interface types.

The following instances types support SR-IOV.

• C3
• C4
• R3
• I2
• M4 (excluding m4.16xlarge)
• D2

After installing the aws-cli RPM from the base repositories, SR-IOV can be enabled using the command below from the head node. To run this command, the instance must be shut off:

[root@bright01 ~]# aws ec2 modify-instance-attribute --instance-id <instance_ID> --sriov-net-support simple
Once the instance comes up, it will come up with the Intel 82599 Virtual Function (VF) interface attached to it. To verify that SR-IOV is enabled, the ixgbevf kernel module should be loaded as the interface driver, as indicated below:

[root@eu-west-1-director ~]# ethtool -i ens3
driver: ixgbevf
version: 2.12.1-k-rh7.2
firmware-version: 
bus-info: 0000:00:03.0
supports-statistics: yes
supports-test: yes
supports-eeprom-access: no
supports-register-dump: yes
supports-priv-flags: no

For more information about SR-IOV, please refer to the AWS official documentation.

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/enhanced-networking.html