Adapter Passthrough for ESXi TrueNAS Setup

[C47]

I'm looking to run ESXi on a HP Proliant server, this has the HP RAID controller Smart Array P420i from my understanding I need to enable Passthrough so the FreeNAS has direct access, so now does this mean I then can no longer run a Datastore on that array? 

Once enabling passthrough the drives no longer show up as available for the data store and the only drive available is the SD card internally I'm running ESXi on. So when passthrough is enabled does it disable it for ESXi to use? How would I accomplish this TrueNAS Setup on an ESXi environment? 

[C47]

Mic Check 12 12, do you need additional details or am I just stuck dead in the water? 

[JCL_MDOT]

You cannot both use pass-through to a VM AND host a datastore to ESXi.  Once you use pass-though, that controller and any drives connected to it become exclusive to the VM.

In order to do this, you will need another drive or another raid controller to host the VM for TrueNAS.

There are people who pass-though individual disks or other tricks to accomplish this, but being familiar with TrueNAS, I don't recommend you do anything like that.  I do this kind of thing myself, and I use two separate controllers.

-JCL

[jdvhunt]

Thankyou so much for replying to this. I have been hunting around for hours and this finally answered my question