Greetings,
I am hoping someone might be able to shed some light on this subject for me. I am using a Dell PowerEdge R710 with ESXi 4.1. My client has a Highpoint RocketRAID 2644x eSATA card plugged into that machine and is trying to use VMDirectPath I/O to pass it into a VM. Ok, so, everything is configured correctly on ESXi - that is, they got to the point where there is a green dot on the card name. The PCI device was added into the VM which has Windows Server 2008 x64 on it.
Initially, upon VM startup, the boot process was noticeably slower than usual. Once booted, Windows found the device and drivers were installed. I was able to get to the point where I could see the array via the included management software. Disk Management saw the disk which is when we went to online it. This is when the wheels came off of the virtual bus... This froze the VM which needed to be powered off and on to resume. I was not able to get it going afterwards. I tried "decoupling" the PCI device from the Windows 2008 VM and moved it to a Windows Server 2003 one. No dice. I also did a power down of the physical box (pulled the power cords out for 1 minute too).
Now, if I try to re-attach the device to a VM the entire ESXi host stops responding. Albeit, when I remove the device from all VMs, everything starts up as expected.
Help? Thanks so much in advance!
