ESXI passthrough Nvidia Quadro P2000

[Taclino]

Hi everyone,

If I am here today it is because I am really desperate...

Recently, I had the idea to turn a regular server into a "GPU Server" in order to help with my studies and to make my father able to have a multi screen flying simulator. I need to keep my ZFS pool that is shared on 3 HDD, so i decided to use ESXI in order to have 1) A FreeBSD server and 2) A graphic windows 10 VM.

Everything works super fine with Freebsd (got the SATA controller passthrough working and one of my network card, yay).

But when it comes to the windows VM, it is a disaster.

I have a Quadro P2000, and I am just trying to passthrough this card to windows. When I go to device manager, I get the classical and sooo annoying "Error 43". But I bought this graphic card because it was supposed to be able to do a passthrough. It's not a consumer grade one, right? On VMware site, it is said that it can do dedicated graphic Passthrough or something similar (one VM at the time). I tried pciHole.start = 2048 and classical hypervisor.cpuid.v0 = FALSE, but no, still not working... (and i don't think i am supposed to do that because it's a pro card, so should work without the last one). Also, I installed the "quadro P2000" driver from nvidia's site...

However, weirdly enough, I got this card to work last night, during few hours. But after reboot, the card "died #43"...

Please, If you have any idea of what I am doing, tell me! It's so annoying and I am about to give up this setup...

I will sooo much appreciate any help, feel free to answer. Thank you so much!

[Taclino · Accepted solution]

Hi everyone, I was able to fix this restarting the hole entire server and not just the windows VM. Thank you for the reading at least.

[pseymer]

If you happen to still have a list of all of the VM parameters you used, could you post? I'm trying to get a P2000 to passthrough and some parameters must be missing (some functionality is missing in the VM). 

[btechit]

1. Toggle PCIE device passthrough in the ESXI host
2. Reboot the host 
3. Make sure VM is powered off.
4. On the VM you are passing through, first make sure there are no snapshots- if any delete & consolidate all snapshots.  Note:  you can't have or use snapshots on a VM that has GPU passthrough setup.
5. Disable/uncheck CPU features: IOMMU and hardware assisted virtualization passthrough
6. Reserve memory in the VM (make sure the host has enough free at the time you power on the VM - eg if you have 16GB reserved, the but the host only has 10 Free right now, power on VM will fail). 
7. Edit VM hardware config and Add the GPU. 
8. power on VM and install the drivers. 

The basics are covered here in video form here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFXtUaFjiO4&t=3s

CPU: 

Mem: