The last time I tried (with 5.5U1) it worked if the VM was installed and booted via UEFI rather than BIOS, but unfortunately that led to a whole host of other issues and I ended up having to downgrade back to 5.1.
Has a workaround been discovered in the months since? Or better yet, can anybody confirm if VMware has fixed this in 5.5U2?
In case anyone else has this issue, I'm happy to report that Update 2 has fixed all passthrough issues for X58/ICH10. I didn't have to do anything special - or more specifically, anything different from 5.1. I just clean installed 5.5U2 from the ISO (with all SATA cables physically disconnected, of course...), (re)configured DirectPath I/O and datastores, fired up the VM, and everything worked as expected - for a change.
Let's just hope future releases (5.5U3? 6.0?) don't break everything again...
Thanks for the link - I have X58/ICH10 rather than Lynx Point, so I missed that discussion but any clue is welcome
As I don't have a spare 5.5 box to test with, would you mind confirming if the problem (prior to modifying the /etc/vmware/passthru.map file) is that the Lynx Point SATA controller doesn't show up in vSphere Client as a device that can be passed through, or that the Lynx Point SATA controller can be selected, but the guest can't see it?
It's the first issue: The controller doesn't show up to be passed through.
For your controller: use lspci -v to find out the parameters to change in /etc/vmware/passthru.map.
See: Re: DirectPath I/O support for Haswell Lynx Point SATA AHCI controller
Good luck
In case anyone else has this issue, I'm happy to report that Update 2 has fixed all passthrough issues for X58/ICH10. I didn't have to do anything special - or more specifically, anything different from 5.1. I just clean installed 5.5U2 from the ISO (with all SATA cables physically disconnected, of course...), (re)configured DirectPath I/O and datastores, fired up the VM, and everything worked as expected - for a change.
Let's just hope future releases (5.5U3? 6.0?) don't break everything again...