The present invention provides a hardware acceleration method and a communications system. The hardware acceleration method includes: sending, by a network functions virtualization orchestrator (NFVO), first request information to a virtualized infrastructure manager (VIM), wherein the first request information is configured to request the VIM to deploy the to-be-accelerated VNF onto a host in a management domain of the VIM, wherein a hardware resource of the host meets a requirement of the to-be-accelerated VNF, and the requirement of the to-be-accelerated VNF includes information indicating a type of a required hardware acceleration resource and a size of the required hardware acceleration resource in the to-be-accelerated VNF; receiving, by the VIM, the first request information from the NFVO; and deploying, by the VIM, the to-be-accelerated VNF onto the host in the management domain of the VIM.