Enabling Azure accelerated networking

Overview

This article describes how to enable Azure Accelerated Networking. If a VM was created without Accelerated Networking, enabling this feature on an existing VM is possible. The VM must meet the following prerequisites:

VM must be a supported size for Accelerated Networking
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

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

If the VM was created individually (without an availability set), only the individual VM needs to stop/deallocate to enable Accelerated Networking.
If the VM was created with an availability set, all VMs contained in the availability set will need to stop/deallocate before enabling Accelerated Networking on any Network Interface Card (NIC).

Azure CLI


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

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

Azure CLI


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

Restart the VM (or all VMs if using an availability set) and confirm that Accelerated Networking is enabled:

Azure CLI


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

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