The present invention discloses a storage device operation method and a physical server, and belongs to the field of computer technologies. The method is applied to the physical server, where a virtual machine is installed on the physical server, and a storage card is inserted into the physical server. The method includes: when the virtual machine receives a data read/write instruction, generating an I/O request for a physical storage device, and sending the I/O request to a client in the storage card, where the storage card can directly communicate with the virtual machine; and when the client receives the I/O request, sending the I/O request to a server, so that the server performs an I/O operation on the physical storage device based on the I/O request. In the present invention, because the storage card can directly communicate with the virtual machine, when sending the I/O request to the client in the storage card, the virtual machine can send the I/O request to the client without using a hypervisor in the physical server, thereby saving computing resources of the physical server.