ESXi 6.7 (and ESXi 7 ?) passthrough for Quadro RTX 4000 (and P2000) for local workstation use?

[petreza]

I am tired of having to mess with VM options in order to get nVidia cards to passthrough.

(System is based on Supermicro X11DPG-QT with Xeon Silver so that's not the issue.)

I had better luck with AMD and am using RX550 with Windows 10 Pro and RX480 with Ubuntu 18.04.

I want to buy a single slot Quadro card that is supported for passthrough in ESXi 6.7 and will be supported in the upcoming ESXi 7

(vDGA - one card, one VM / not the vGPU sharing thing - GRID)

The Quadro P2000 is cheaper (and good enough for my needs) but support might be dropped with ESXi 7.

The Quadro RTX 4000 is more than double the price and there is no mention of vDGA support in any ESXi version. The only info my searching could find was that someone was able to passthrough both RTX 6000 and RTX 8000 without any issues.

Any advise?

Thanks!

[petreza]

To answer my own question, yes, Quadro RTX 4000 is supported (according to nVidia, at least)

Went to nVidia's driver download page and selected the Windows 10 drivers for Quadro 4000.

As of today March 17, 2020, it gave me Version R440 U5 (442.50)

Then go to the last tab "Additional Information" ---> Release Notes

On p.20+ of the PDF it gives some important info plus a list of the supported cards:

"On systems with two or more graphics cards installed, this driver supports a hypervisor's ability to directly assign GPUs to guest virtual machines (VMs). This direct assignment allows each guest VM to run on their own operating system with their own GPU and driver. The assignment allows full GPU performance and functionality in the guest VM."

Q: What if you only have 1 graphics card?

"The following hypervisors are supported:

Citrix XenServer Version 6.0 and later.

VMware vSphere (ESX / ESXi) Version 5.1 and later.

Parallels Workstation Extreme Version 4 and later"

The following GPUs are supported for device passthrough:

Turing:   Quadro - RTX 8000, RTX 6000, RTX 5000, RTX 4000

          Tesla  - n/a as of March 2020

Volta:    Quadro - GV100

          Tesla  - V100

Pascal:   Quadro - P2000, P4000, P5000, P6000, GP100

          Tesla  - P100, P40, P4

Maxwell:  Quadro - K2200, M2000, M4000, M5000, M6000, M6000 24GB

          Tesla  - M60, M6

Kepler:   Quadro - K2000, K4000, K4200, K5000, K5200, K6000

          Tesla  - K10, K20, K20x, K20Xm, K20c, K20s, K40m, K40c, K40s, K40st, K40t, K80