A hardware acceleration method and a relevant device. The hardware acceleration method comprises: a functional entity determines the type and size of a hardware acceleration resource required in a virtual network element VNF to be accelerated in a management domain of the functional entity (201); the functional entity determines a target virtual infrastructure manager (VIM) (202); and the functional entity deploys the VNF to be accelerated to a target host in a management domain of the target VIM via the target VIM (203). The functional entity deploys the VNF to be accelerated to a target host of which the size of a hardware matching resource is greater than the size of the hardware acceleration resource required by the VNF to be accelerated, so that the type of hardware acceleration resource required by the VNF to be accelerated can match the type of hardware matching resource of the target host, thus the hardware matching resource of the target host is made to be able to satisfy the acceleration requirement of the VNF to be accelerated, thereby effectively improving the performance of the VNF to be accelerated.