passthrough of SATA controller not working on ESXi 7, AMD x570 board

[am312]

I'm trying to enable passthrough of a SATA controller. I can't get past the "Enabled / Needs reboot" state. I have an NVMe PCIe card which is passed through to the guest successfully so the bios is set to permit virtualization.

Running VMware ESXi 7.0.0 build 16324942

ASRock x570m-pro4 AMD motherboard

Booting ESXi off USB drive

ESXi appears to have correctly added the device /etc/vmware/passthru.map :

[root@x:/etc/vmware] grep vmhba0 *

esx.conf:/vmkdevmgr/pci/p0000:08:00.0/alias = "vmhba0"

esx.conf:/vmkdevmgr/logical/pci#p0000:08:00.0#0/alias = "vmhba0"

[root@x:/etc/vmware] tail -n 2 passthru.map

# AMD FCH SATA Controller [AHCI mode]

1022 7901 d3d0 default

Should I be able to add the SATA controller to the guest VM using "add other device" ?

[am312]

I'm now running ESXi 7.0 U1 and still seeing the same issue.  Any workaround for this?

[scott28tt]

What are you trying to achieve by doing this?

[luisma31]

Having the same issue with a ASRock X570D4U-2L2T, I will remove the hard drives from the SATA controller and see if the "Enabled / Needs Reboot" message changes to just Enabled. It is frustrating because I would like to use the onboard SATA without adding an external HBA which will consume lanes and such.

Will report back in a few minutes with the results

[luisma31]

Even with the drives disconnected the Needs Reboot comment remains and can't pass the onboard sata over to the VM, I guess I will have to purchase an external HBA

[Sjaber92]

Having same issue with my 470D4U mb. NVMe worked withouth a problem. Using 7.0 Update 1

Anyone found a solution?

[mikechambers]

Having the same issue with the same MB. (Asrock Rack x570d4u-2l2t)

Setting IOMMU to ENABLE in the BIOS didn't fix it.

[mikechambers]

Following the advice in a reddit thread, I did find a solution that seems to work. (thanks to DarkOoby and z0mgchris)

- Toggle passthrough for your device to on (it should say require reboot)

- Put ESXi into maintenance mode

- Change Manage->Advance Settings->VMkernel.Boot.disableACSCheck from false to true

- Reboot and exit maintenance mode

I do not know what disableACSCheck does or what the ramifications of this change might be, so proceed at your own risk.

[Sjaber92]

Thanks for sharing. I did buy a HBA card to solve this problem.

[luisma31]

Thank you for posting, apparently this will force it to work and with some other devices like for example USB booting devices it has worked for some successfully but others using for example Thunderbolts ports were getting constant AHCI resets. Good to know about the feature though.

Found this KB which explains in detail what the feature does

https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2142307