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akuznetsov
Contributor
Contributor

PCI-E SATA pass-through, the disks aren't visible to guest

Hello All !

Setup:

Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-1620 0 @ 3.60GHz

SUPERMICRO X9SRL-F

2x3tb HDD + 1x512GB HDD + 1x120GB SSD

32GB Mem

I've tried to pass-through both 6-port and 4-port onboard SATA controllers to  guest OS (Nexenta) one by one. The controllers passed-through (and assigned to Nexenta) w/o any problems, but the HDDs weren't visible to the guest OS. I've tried different combinations of controller/HDD, but no luck.

Maybe somebody was in the same situation, how can I fix it ?

I'm gonna to try RDM next weekend, but I've read it's not very good solution...

Thanks.

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DavoudTeimouri
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

RDM is good solution for you. For using Pass-Through, you need to reserve all virtual machine's memory.

But you can use RDM without that.

Also you can direct your SATA HDD to your VM easily.

http://www.teimouri.net/add-sata-drives-to-esxi-5/

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Davoud Teimouri - https://www.teimouri.net - Twitter: @davoud_teimouri Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/teimouri.net/
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akuznetsov
Contributor
Contributor

Thanks for reply. I'll try it as soon as have some free time...

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akuznetsov
Contributor
Contributor

Hello again !

Thanks for tip, I've tried it and it works ok. I've started up Nexenta, created NFS share, connected it to ESXi as a datastore. Migrating 50GB VM from dedicated HDD to NFS was ok, speed ~150MBs.

But when I've tried to start migrated VM there was no luck (VM status is Powered On, but actually there no any reaction from VM).

I started to dig deeper.

I've tried to migrate that VM back to dedicated HDD. Read speed from Nexenta's NFS became incredibly slow (KBs) and the connection is dropping permanently. 1% of copying took several hours. As I understand, ESXi starting to copy from one DS to another, loses connection, trying to restore it, starting to copy again, etc...

There's nothing bad in logs in both ESXi and Nexenta.

I have no more idea where to dig to. Maybe someone got ideas ?

Thanks. 

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