Hardware Pass-through - ESXi 6.5

[Teparky]

Hi Guys,

I wont to experiment with Direct Hardware Pass-through n ESXi. My Motherboard supports Intel VT-d and Intel VT-x and both features are enabled in the BIOS.

When I have a look at the hardware that is available to be used for Pass-Through some items show as they can be Passed-Through but are Grayed out (example NVIDA GTX 610 in Screen Print below).

One thing that I have noticed is that it says the PCI X16 Slot doesn't support Pass-Through. I'm guessing as this is what I'm setting that the GPU Plugged into the PCI X16 Slot wont be able to be used. If this is the case this is strange as it says the NVIDIA GT110 HDMI Audio Controller can be passed.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to what might be causing this or if there is anything I can do to get this working?

I am in the future looking at getting something like a ASUS WS Motherboard for an actual build using VMWare and ESXi to run 2 or maybe more VM's using Hardware Pass-Through.

Regards,

[roman79]

Hi Teparky,

In your case, a video card is used by the hypervisor and is probably not supported for the VMDirectPath I/O pass-through.

I would suggest looking into this article - VMware Knowledge Base - to find information about system requirements and configuration for PCI Passthrough.

[Sinorama]

PCI Passthrough of NVidia cards is usually software-restricted to the professional Quadro series of cards. It is unclear to me where it says PCI X16 Slot doesn't support Pass-Through.