Enabling Azure Accelerated Networking

If you have created a VM without Accelerated Networking, it is possible to enable this feature on an existing VM. The VM must support Accelerated Networking by meeting the following prerequisites that are also outlined above:

• The VM must be a supported size for Accelerated Networking
• The VM must be a supported Azure Gallery image (and kernel version for Linux)
• All individual VMs or VMs in an availability set must be stopped/deallocated before enabling Accelerated Networking on any NIC

For more information, please see the Azure documentation.

Individual VMs and VMs in an availability set

First stop/deallocate the VM or, if an Availability Set, all the VMs in the Set:

az vm deallocate \
    --resource-group myResourceGroup \
    --name myVM

Important, please note, if your VM was created individually, without an availability set, you only need to stop/deallocate the individual VM to enable Accelerated Networking. If your VM was created with an availability set, all VMs contained in the availability set will need to be stopped/deallocated before enabling Accelerated Networking on any of the NICs.

Once stopped, enable Accelerated Networking on the NIC of your VM:

az network nic update \
    --name myNic \
    --resource-group myResourceGroup \
    --accelerated-networking true

Restart your VM or, if in an Availability Set, all the VMs in the Set and confirm that Accelerated Networking is enabled:

az vm start --resource-group myResourceGroup \
    --name myVM

After the restart, the Mellanox VF (Virtual Function) device will be exposed to the VM.