twood201110141's Posts

Hi sowdesh, I'm also using one VGA card (ati 5450) for both ESX server as well as a VMDP device. My ESX 4.1 server is running on an Asus whitebox mobo (P6X58D-E) and the guest OS with the VGA assigned as VMDP is a windows 7 64 bit machine. I have also tried with windows XP and windows 7 32 bit and is working there too. I am just limited to 2GB vRam allways. So anyways back to your problem, I think that what you describe is normal up to a point. In the beginning when i initially configured my video for passthrough I too noticed that as soon as i powered on the VM which has the passthrough video assigned, the ESX server's console went blank. Back to my VI console I went to the screen resolution settings and first i had to select "extend these displays" and then "show desktop only on 2" which is the VMDP display as it seems that the vmware adapter is still the primary one. After that everytime i power on this VM the ESX console is redirecting to the VMDP display and the VI console just shows the win7 boot logo but this is fine as everything is being displayed directly to my monitor and this is so cool actually. Makes the VM feel like a native machine. So try to hit detect under screen settings and then choose "extend displays" hit apply and then "show only on 2" and apply again. If nothing happens there then I can't really know what could be wrong with your setup. You will also need to VMDP a usb controller too so as to have native imput on your VM.

Well the way I understand this is that when you VMDP a device you are declaring it as a device that can be used directly from a Virtual Machine and therefore bypass the vmkernel for that device. It is like taking the device from the ESX server and having it ready for passthrough. At this point nothing really happens except of course that ESX server can no longer access the device, so be careful what you choose there as you may ruin your ESX installation. (for instance VMDP the sata controller where your ESX boot disk relies!!!) You will also need to reboot the ESX server after configuring devices for passthrough. So after that you will have to assign the VMDP device by editing the target VM's configuration and add the device found under "PCI devices". You can add up to 6 VMDP devices and of course you cannot have more than one VM's sharing the same VMDP device. This will benefit you with performance but will sacrifice some of the nice features of ESXi hypervisor such as snapshots, hot plug disks or nics etc. And of course will bound you with the need to reserve all the memory configured on the VM and the dreadfull pci.hole error when you try to give more than 2GB RAM to the VM. It is a nice feature though this bug seems to spoil the fun. On the screenshots attached you can see my VMDP configurations

Well what the guy mentions in the video is that you need to have memory reservation on the vm that has vmdp devices assigned, equal to the vRAM configured, otherwise it will give you an error on power on. This is a well known prerequisite to run a VM that uses VMDP devices. Our porblems with the 2GB limtitation begin well after that. The problem is well described on the first posts of the thread. I wish a vmware representative come to this thread and give us his lights!

Hi TheGrave, In fact you can click inside the VI console of the Virtual machine, and then switch your monitor to your VMDP VGA, (assuming you have assigned a VMDP vga to your VM) and you will actually see the cursor moving there which is very funny considering you "left' your input to the VI console. This is very buggy though (slow moving and jumpy cursor ) and you also need a second PC to launch your VI console. So the best way to do this, as Dave mentioned, is to VMDP a couple of USB ports to your Virtual Machine and attach there a pair of keyboard and mouse. Now regarding both inputs and sound output In my setup I have my ESXi 4.1 running happily, and i have VMDP one usb port (this is because I have a PC along with my ESXi and i use a KVM which has the keyboard and mouse attached) one ATI 5450 VGA adapter, one creative labs soundblaster audigy and the onboard firewire which I have not tested yet. Input, sound and graphics all work great. For the sound I couldn't VMDP the onboard sound card as it was crashing my ESXi for some reason, so I just plugged an old good soundblaster audigy that was hanging around Regaring which usb port to VMDP which actually means which of the usb controllers to use, you will have to do some trial and error until you find the right ones. I recommened to try one or two usb controllers each time and not all at once. regards Theo

Hi Niklas, Let me try to answer your questions. So for your first question what I have seen until now is that when you have a vm installation with more than 2GB of vRAM configured and you add a VMDirectPath Graphics adapter then you will get the pci.hole error an the VM will fail to power on. In fact even if you do a new instalation with the VMDP graphics adapter attached you will also get the same behaviour. The problem is even if you add the parameter to your vmx and you manage to poweron the VM you will not be able to boot this machine as you will get BSODs all the time.The only workaround seems to be to lower the vRAM configured to 2GB or below! The 32bit systems behave slightly different, but still not any beter at all (see my posts above). Could you please play a bit more and confirm you are getting also the same behaviour? Second and third question: You can't get rid of the default vmware graphics adapter. Think of it as a system with two VGAs. You will need to go to graphics properties and choose to extend the display to the second -the VMDP- graphics adapter. Then you better choose to outpout only to that adapter to avoid any problem bettween these vmware adapter and the physical one. You will then notice that the VI console will go black and your VM will have its video output to your screen (where you once had your ESX server output) using the VMDP graphics adapter. This way you won't get any "no signal" anymore to your display Unfortunately as soon as you power off this VM, the screen output will not redirect to your ESX's server console. It will just go black. You can reboot the ESX server to get its console back to your screen or you can use two graphics adapters if you want to have both the ESX console and the VM's VMDP display running independently. Regards, Theo

I have tried also to install windows 7 x64 with the vmdirectpath VGA attached and 2GB of ram. Unfortunately doesn't make any difference.As soon as you increase RAM it will fail to power on.Should you add the pcihole parameter it will BSOD! I have managed to work this out a bit with windows xp 32 bit VM and the paremeter pcihole.start="2888" The problem is that although the VM has 4GB of RAM configured it will actually see 2.8GB of RAM (inside the OS) with this parameter At least it is functional, no BSODs or anything. Still not good enough though! Seems we have hit a problem with passthrough devices, memory mapping, and 32bit vs 64bit configurations Could it be related to radeon cards only? Has anyone test this with an nvidia graphics adapter or a radeon with 256MB or 512MB of GPU RAM? I think it has also to do with the amount of RAM of your graphics card. In my case both cards i tried are 1GB cards. The whole story reminds me of the old x86 days when you needed a miracle to go above the 2GB ram limit!

Hello I have exactly the same problem. I'm running an ESXi 4.1 with my ATI Radeon 5450 (1GB Pcie card) VMDirectPath enabled. When the VM that has this card attached and also configured with 4GB of RAM it will fail to power on. this is from vmware.log [msg.pciPassthru.mmioOutsidePCIHole] PCIPassthru 003:00.0: Guest tried to map 32 device pages (with base address of 0xb5d20) to a range occupied by main memory. This is outside of the PCI Hole. Add pciHole.start = "2909" to the configuration file and then power on the VM. When I add this parameter it will fail again and suggest another value. When I put that value it will fail again and suggest the value 2888 WIth this value it will power on eventually but it will imediately crash to a BSOD. You can see the screenshot attached. I have tried to modify BIOS settings and change cache options but nothing works! The only way to make it work is to reduce the memory to 2GB. I always check to have equal configured RAM with the reserved RAM. I have tested this with Win XP 32bit, Win7 32bit and Win7 64 bit. The problem is always the same. I even have tried this with another card an ATI 4890 graphics card and again I had the same problem! Any ideas?