Giving access from a VM to a NIC directly

[andy2005]

Hi, folks !!

I have implemented next configuration:

One host ESXi, running ESXi 5.5

4 NICs, all of them recogniced by the system and working fine

1 x Adaptec 6805E

1 x SSD Kingston 128 Gb

4 x 2Tb Seagate Barracuda sATA disks

I want to run one virtual machine under Openfiler for doing a NAS system, employing all 2Tb disks and the Adaptec controller in a Raid 10 configuration

There are 2 datastores in the system: SSD (for quick start of the hypervisor, and quick start default virtual machines, as VCenter appliance and NAS under construction) and 4x2Tb disks, thant will be used only for a NAS system.

Ok, I've just loaded, installed and configure Openfiler machine, connected to the uplink card by VM port group, and the VKernel port group for management purposes, too (all under the same Vswitch, as default).

Rest, 2 of the NICS, should connect to another ESXi physical hosts for giving NAS services.

My question is:

How could I connect the Openfiler VM directly to the physical NICS for connecting them to the other ESXi physical hosts? I find no way to make it...

Thanks a lot

[cjscol]

How about if you created two vSwitches.  The vSwitch you already have with 2 of the physical NICs connected to it and a 2nd vSwitch with the 2 physical NICs that will be used by OpenFiler NAS service to the other host.  Then create a VM Port Group on the 2nd vSwitch for the OpenFiler VM to use.  You may want to create two VM Port Groups on this 2nd switch on different VLANs to provide redundancy.

[satishchirala]

HOWTO 101: configuring VMDirectPath IO with Cisco UCS and vSphere - YouTube

VMware KB: Configuring VMDirectPath I/O pass-through devices on a VMware ESX or VMware ESXi host

[andy2005]

Hi, guys. Thanks a lot for your help.

First solution you gave me appears to be the most affordable, just not to be the ideal but it works !!

However, refering to the second, I can´t configure the system as "i/o passthrough". Processors don´t have VT-d features and there is no way to activate it (Xeon 54xx and Opteron 24xx)

Any workaround method to implement this?

My goal would be to connect physical hardware resources (Nic, disk Raid controllers, etc.) directly to virtual machines. Ideal one resource per virtual machine only!!

So: one virtual machine could act as a NAS server, with my Adaptec 6805H Raid card and another independent of the first could act as a firewall appliance (XTMv)...

Suggestions if I couldn´t use i/o passthrough?

Thanks again !!

[TomHowarth]

You are missing the point of virtualization here.

I am assuming that you have a single ESXi host.  there is no requirement that you dedicate a physical nic to your NAS,  if you want it separate then just create another vSwitch and attach the nic as the uplink. This will be exactly the same as attempting to direct map your NIC  not a situation I would recommend.

Also how are you going to consume the openfiler?  if you are going to create NFS or iSCSI datastores for your environment you will need to create some vkernel portgroups for either NFS or iSCSI