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ESXi 5.5 Host freezes on pciPassThru

I have an odd problem with pci passthru on EXSi 5.5.

I've created a test VM with Windows 7 Pro 32bit and VMware tools installed, VM version 10. In the passthru settings I have passed through an ATI Radeon HD5450. Once the VM has booted, I can get it to detect and output the the ATI card and turn off output to the built in VMWare SVGA display (I use TightVNC to control the VM when the console output is disabled.). However, if I reboot the machine, I can see it begin to start up on the VMware console, then once the drivers load and it tries to swap over to the ATI card, it causes the host to freeze. There is no PSOD or error, it just freezes and no longer responds.

If I then reboot the physical machine to restart the host, and then try and start the VM again, this time it will start ok (After selecting "Start windows normally" from the boot menu). If I then reboot it again, it will freeze the host on startup. I then have to restart the host again and then it will work. Basically the VM seems to work on first boot after a host restart only, after that it will freeze the host.

If I disable the built in VMware SVGA adapter, when the VM does starts up it doesn't detect the ATI card, so I have to leave the VMware SVGA adapter enabled and just change the monitor output settings to not use it.

The whole point of the test machine is to see if I can virtualise my CCTV pc. Because of this I have also tried to pass through the DVR capture card. I have managed to install the software and the card is detected. However, this causes a similar problem in that when I do get the VM to boot, as soon as I start the DVR software it causes the host to freeze. The DVR card requires DirectX, hense the need for the ATI card.

It seems like there is a problem with the pci passthru, I'm very new to this vmware stuff so can anyone give me some pointers as to where to look to begin to troubleshoot these problems.

Host machine is a Dell Poweredge T310.

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