Presenting Fiber HBA's to VM under ESXi 6

[usao]

Is it possible to present host fiber HBA's to the VM directly rather than just the RAW luns?

I would like to enable multipathing on my VM, but when I present a multipathed RAW lun to the VM it only shows up as a single path.

The reason for wanting to do this is to ensure that our production (non-VM) boxes match the configuration and software stack that the DEV/TST (which are VM) are running with.

This will aid in minimizing the configuration differences between DEV/TST and PRD environments.

[MKguy]

Is it possible to present host fiber HBA's to the VM directly rather than just the RAW luns?

This can only be achieved by passing the entire HBA PCI device to a VM via vmdirectpath I/O, with all the limitations it incurs, including and not limited to:

- No vMotion/HA

- Device can only be used by a single VM, no sharing with host

- No Snapshots

See here for reference:

http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-50/topic/com.vmware.vsphere.networking.doc_50/GUID-BF2770C3-39ED-4BC5...

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

VMware KB: VMware vSphere VMDirectPath I/O: Requirements for Platforms and Devices

I really can't recommend using it.

Contrary to popular belief, NPIV does NOT do anything like this. It's simply a mapping of additional WWNs to certain LUNs where all abstraction is done by the host. The VM will still only see a SCSI disk device on a virtual SCSI controller device.