VMdirect Path and Dell Poweredge T110 II

[Drumboy444]

has anyone gotten the DirectPath I/O working on the Dell Poweredge T110 II?  On the summary tab I have a warning stating that The hardware of the host does not support DirectPath I/O.  I have virtualization enabled in the BIOS.  Also on the configuration tab I have the error "Host does not support passthrough configuration"  My CPU is an intel Core I3-3220 3.3 Ghz.   Has anyone gotten this to work with the latest BIOS?  I want to use external USB drives for file storage and not have to take up one of the internal slots, and just use the internal slots for raiding my ESXI build.  Any help in this would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Stephen Bailey

[Drumboy444 · Accepted solution]

I have found out that my processor does not support directpath I/O, so there is no hope in getting that working.  I did find a work around however in getting a USB device passed through.

While VMdirectpath i/o would be nice there is also USB device passthrough which is another way for direct communication with a hardware device to a guest OS.  ESXI allows for USB Device Passthrough (this can be done without vmdirect path).

When I first tried this (I didn't realize at the time that ESXI 5.0 didn't support USB 3.0) my usb 3.0 device wasn't being passed through and I thought that it was because of a misconfiguration of vmdirect path.  I did some further research after I found out that my processor didn't support directpath and found the documentation for USB device passthrough.  All I had to do was add the USB controller to my Guest OS configuration then added a "usb device" to my Guest OS configuration which found the name of the device plugged in.  I was then able to add a USB 2.0 device and my guest OS sees is just fine.