ESXi 6.0 U2, Passthrough Video Card, Hang/Freeze

[mvrk]

Hi,

I'm trying to build an ESXi home white box for gaming, but one of my requirement is to have a board with IPMI KVM for remote administration.

Right now i have this setup:

MB: Asrock Rack EPC602D8A

CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3820 CPU @ 3.60GHz

RAM: 20GB

3 x 4GB DDR3 PC3-10600 (Kingston 99U5471-020.A00LF)

1 x 8GB DDR3 PC3-10600 (Kingston 99U5471-052.A00LF)

RAID CARD: LSI MegaRaid 8888ELP

GPUs TRIED: NVIDIA GTX480 and AMD Radeon HD7800

ESXi: 6.0 U2

The problem i'm having is that when i start my VM that has the GPU with passthrough causes the ESXi to complete hang.

Anyone as seen this problem before? Any suggestion? Does anyone knows of any motherboard with IPMI (AMD or Intel) that would work?

[samreed]

I've got the same issue when starting a Windows 10 VM with an AMD 7970 passthrough. As soon as I power on the VM, ESXi hangs and is unresponsive to a locally attached keyboard and all network communication. Can't even ping it.

ESXi: 6.0 U2

MB:  Asrock Rack EP2C602-4L/D16

CPU: Intel Xeon E5-2670 C2 stepping

RAM: 32GB

I haven't tried any other guest OS except Windows 10 so I'm not sure if that's the issue.

Considering downgrading to 5.5 to see if that helps - a friend has had other passthrough issues on 6 too.

[samreed]

Downgraded to ESXi 5.5 and now have GPU passthrough working with the same hardware and guest OS from my earlier reply. Interestingly, I can only modify the VM that has passthrough from the native client, not from the ESXi embedded web client fling I installed later. I get an error about an invalid PCIe ID if I try to make changes from the web interface. Native client can make changes fine though.

Edit: answering your original concern, I would think your MB will work fine as it's the same line as mine, albeit mine is the dual CPU quad LAN version.

[vmhugo]

Same issue for me. ESXi 6.0U2.

I can't even get the VM to power on. If I disable 3D Support for the VMware Video Card, the server freezes (completely locks up, no, video, no NIC, nothing) There is no PSOD.

Can't rollback to 5.5, so will have to wait till its fixed.

[mvrk]

Hi,

For me not even on 5.5 was working.

The only way i was able to make it work was changing the /etc/vmware/passthru.map

I changed the existing entrance for NVIDIA devices from bridge to link and also add a similar line for my ATI card:

# ATI

1002  6818  link   false

1002  aab0  link   false

# NVIDIA

10de  ffff  link   false

With this settings now works fine on 5.5U3b and 6.0U2.

[jpstaub]

Brilliant!

I've also had good success with enabling/disabling the GPU driver through scripts and scheduled tasks.

Cheers,

Jake

[paco3346]

Brilliant! I was having troubles with my AMD card on 6.5 and setting it to link mode solved my issue!

For the lazy- ESXi uses 'ffff' as a wildcard so you can fix all AMD cards by adding:

1002 ffff link false to /etc/vmware/passthru.map

[Memnarch]

A few more notes on this fix-- 

I was debugging a 3 GPU system (Radeon R460, Geforce 670, Quadro K5000) on Esxi 6.5 with hardware passthrough of GPU and USB controller for each VM.

masking the hypervisor fixed the error 43 on the Geforce VM windows driver.

Very frustrating complete system lockups on restarting VM's various VM's, not completely reproducible. 

Early on I figured the VM with the Radeon was causing most of the crashes. Replacing it with another Geforce 670 yielded a system where:

1) I could start, restart, shutdown all VM's without crashing IF I didn't log in to any of the VM's;

2) (less frequent but still problematic) lockups when shutdown/restarting.

3) One of the VM's would randomly come up with no USB passthrough working .

To make a long story short,

the fix described above (nvidia version)  completely and totally fixed the problem including the mysterious USB issue.

Thank you!

[Kashmir1979]

This solved the problem for me on 

ESXi 6.5 U2

AMD RX550 2g

However, I don' see any ATI entries in the file