I've used VMDirectPath I/O to successfully passthrough an AMD Radeon HD6450 to MS Windows 7 64-bit for the last 18 months with ESXi 5.0, 5.1, 5.5, and now 6.0.
This past week, I started having issues after a recent set of Windows patches. I tried to use Recovery to roll back but I had no restore points. I decided to start from scratch and create a new VM with a fresh installation of Windows 7. I installed Windows 7 64-bit and allowed all the updates to be applied over the last 2 days. After over 200 Updates, I installed VMware Tools. Everything was fine to this point. After that, I attempted to passthrough the AMD GPU again. The configuration is accepted, and the memory is locked. The machine boots fine, but the display freezes after about 2 minutes - faster if there is any activity on the screen.
There are no error messages in the Event Viewer in the vSphere client.
I can remove the passthrough video card, and the VM continues to work fine via the console display or via VNC.
I'm stumped. Any ideas to help troubleshoot, or resolve this issue? Could additional manual pcihole configuration help?
Thanks,
John
