Geforce GT 710 not passing through on Vsphere 7

[souljatechie]

I am pretty new to the vsphere world, so with that being said.... here goes.

My situation is this... I have a home built rig that i am trying to emulate from a youtube video in which I have 2 vm's running on my desktop (one will be a daily driver for my wife and the other will be a midrange gaming vm with an radeon 5500xt.  The video used Unraid, but neither of my video cards (no matter how hard I tried) would update drivers when the vm booted up. Basically, im left with the windows generic video at 800x600 resolution. I gave up on Unraid when i found out that vsphere also allows passthrough.  as it turns out, though, I cant even get the gt710 to pass through. i enabled it in the hardware settings, but it says "enabled, needs restart".  I have restarted multiple times through the web gui, and the console, but still it sits at "... needs restart".

is there a fix for this?  Im just wanting to get the GT710 working correctly (if its possible), then ill worry about the 550xt.

Thanks in advance for the help

[daphnissov]

I realize you're new to virtualization (what you have is not vSphere but rather ESXi), but seriously, what you're trying to do...you shouldn't be trying to do it. Passing through unsupported, consumer hardware to virtual machines running on a platform designed for enterprise hardware defeats the purpose of virtualization. You're going to be fighting an uphill battle as you attempt to do things that were never intended on being done. If you need access to physical hardware and want a gaming rig like it seems like you do, that is not a candidate for virtualization. Stick with a PC and be on your way. You'll end up living longer and having more hair because of it.

[souljatechie]

daphnissov​, Thanks for the reply.  Yeah, what you say is seeming more and more like the truth. But in all fairness, ESXi wasnt my first choice for this project.  Unraid was SUPPOSED to be the easiest to setup for what i am trying to do.... I just stumbled across ESXi as it claimed to allow gpu passthrough (and Unraid wasnt working). There are numerous videos on you tube showing how this has been done with Unraid and ESXi,and they are all like "click this".  Boom GPU passthrough to a vm and you are golden.  Even the VMWare videos show people doing this by literally just enabling passthrough on the hardware menu and it just works.

I know i rambled on, but seriously, thanks for the input.  GPU passthrough to a vm has been done, as evidence in all the youtube videos, and i will find a way.... :smileycool:

[daphnissov]

Yeah, but here's the thing:  GPU pass-through on unsupported, untested, consumer hardware doesn't always work. So just because Joe showed how to do it with his Radeon FU1000 doesn't necessarily mean it'll work with your GeForce OMG2050x. And even if it does work on the initial pass-through, you don't know how it'll continue to behave. So, again, you're trying to squeeze a square peg into a round hole. This isn't virtualization and it defeats most of the purposes and benefits. But good luck to you regardless.