DirectPath I/O is a passthrough method where you are assigning a physical NIC to a VM directly (bypassing the hypervisor). I got confused as to why you will use it to do packet capture. If you want to do a packet capture of a VM, then there are other ways to do it. In a Standard Switch, you can do promiscuous mode and the run a packet analyzer like Wireshark. If you have Distributed switch, then you can use the advanced features like Port Mirroring to a physical switch port. A good blog is this http://blog.packet-foo.com/2013/04/capturing-packets-of-vmware-machines/
If you would like to do ESXi host packet capture then you can just use this KB VMware KB: Capturing a network trace in ESXi using Tech Support Mode or ESXi Shell
Regards.
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