rmathis1984's Posts

@technobro1 As long as the laptop is supported under HCL and the CPU has VT-D or MMOU "Whatever AMD version is" it will work. But the question is why would you want to load ESXi on a laptop to do VGA passthrough. It might be more suited to VMware Workstation. But then again what are you asking...

To be honest Csyckad ESXi 5.0 is a better bet if you want to do passthrough. It has working USB where 5.1 dosent. HDMI audio is normaly going to be driver related. You can attempted to lower the audio quality in Windows and see if that helps but I have little hopes for that... Need a tab more background on your VM setup to find the cause. There is very little difference between 5.0 and 5.1 for a home lab unless your actually using DRS... In that case I opt to eat my own words lol.

Yup the PCI Pinhole trick will get you key to more RAM on the VM. ESXi it's self dosent require a card for output when running. At least it wont complain. You'll end up "with the VM powered off" at a point where you can no longer recover the host aka you'll see cnc-register or something like that at boot and it appear that the host isnt booting. At that point the devices has been allocated to a VM which is why passthrough works on a host with a single video card. With your setup having the 2nd video card in, you need to assign it to another VM to remove the host access. Or just dont plug a monitor in. But I'm going to guess your talking about the console video or the VM video driver... Nope that driver has to stay but it dosent have to be enabled for output. Don't disable it in device manager. All you need to do is set your VM's primary monitor to the video card and you'll be good. 5.1 is still broken with USB passthrough. I tried that the other day but 5.0 u2 while it was unstable at first worked out on a fresh load of the host and I havent turned back since.

Umm ya I would hope a 4000 works. It's on the supported list for View. It's one of a very select few, that card is also WAY past the cost bracket most people are trying to do on this forum with passthru. That card is allows for a virtual GPU to a View desktop so that you can use 3d from a remote machine not local like passthru. With that style of card switch to View and run a few desktops with 3d enabled on the pool. A single user will be hard pressed to push one of those cards to the limits unless you doing heavy CAD.

Its back on 23~26ish or so half way down the page. Which speaking of I need to add my own hardware in. For the Install here a few tips. 1.) Latest BIOS,UEFI 2.) Limited the devices being passed thru to start use only the Video. Dont add any USB at the same time. This is to ensure that the board will work. 3.) Use a known working combo use Win7 or 8 x64 seems to be very common. 4.) Fresh install of the OS 2Gb RAM max. 5.) Snap shot the machine!!!! 6.) Do not install CCC the first pass do install not in safe mode. 7.) If no BSOD or worse Purple screen the server "Opps a few times" shutdown snap again and then install CCC. 8.) If your still broken give me beer and pizza and I'll take a look with ya. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Aqp_xYBwP_Y7dE5EclhtaDdIV09lNWxfODd1alRUTlE

@spangers I ran into this with my mobo turned out it was the on board video option. I though it was disabled with the option of disable but I also had to change the onboard video memory to Auto for it to be fully off. I know you said it's disabled and the audio as well. How did you do it. Stupid question but it seems to be the only thing that would cause your problem.

7970 will work just fine if your doing going to use it to connect to a monitor or TV. For password cracking not so much. It has the power but your wont get the same possible number crunching that the machine can do as a physical box. Unless your running x2 physical CPU's in the box. That tiny bit of cpu time required will be noticed if your doing this on a home machine for academic purposes. Theres other much more prefered methods of doing it but if you dont care how long it will take or the added delay isnt an issue then by all means have at it. Now be quite you :smileysilly: you let some other peoples purposes be known to the world...

@uypzTic Was going to say stay away from Mint14 at the moment. Found out the hardway about ATI drivers on 14. I have a duel boot on a laptop "shoot me its for work" and it was the most unstable version I've ever had to work with ATI video mind you. I'm thinking the drivers dont support the kernal version yet. While it was very differnt "stable" as a VM with the standard software video it didnt play well at all with a real video card. For the kernal running 3.5 I think or so on Mint14,  ESXi 5.1 will be alot more stable then 5.0 but I'm not sure if 5.1 had the passthrough issues sorted out yet. On 5.0U2 I have been hitting some nasty lag issues that wernt on U1. Try playing MechWarrior online and dropping to 10FPS! So far Mint13 Mate with a 7750 has been very nice to me even compiz visuals works flawless.

@Herb0ne nope that's the catch to passthrough. It dosent work for a desktop on remote with the View agent. This in an alternative approch for media center type PC's or maybe a network status monitor so you have the direct display output. If you want to stream which is what I wanted to do you will need to have one of the big boy video cards. A Qudaro 2k,3k,4k series beast to do the work. Those will work for the offload which you want but a off the shelf for a home use wont. I expect View to catch up and start using more cards in the future but as of today it's limited. If your dead set on remote 3D for a lab you'll need to switch to Xen, 2k8 r2 with RemoteFX on or Hyper-V.

@bwiklander // 1. "You can't pass on a single port, but you can set up RDM (raw device mapping?) google it." sorry, didnt know that, Is RDM the same thing, do oyu get full access to the disk?, can you for example put it to sleep and such like advanced IO functions?" \\ Nope RDM is not the same. RDM is direct access to a SAN/NAS volume. Where in this case he would need to pass the local controller to the VM which isnt the same as its a local storage disk he's passing.

Both have the 8111E NIC's which do work. Stability is in questions its been a hit or miss for me. I have that same NIC in several machines over the past few years. Sometimes its rock solid sometimes it's not. As long as you use the lastest updates on 5.0u1 you shouldnt see much of a problem unless you start dropping VLAN's on then you might. Use a cheap Intel NIC its worth the $20 to $30... Ignore the possible headaches. For the Max speed on a NAS unit I have FreeNAS running and see 280MBs copys inside the host and 110MB's outside on 1Gbs switch. Saturated links arent much of a problem anymore. If you use FreeNAS avoid ZFS unless you want to dump at least 4Gb memory of you wont see the functions of ZFS in use or it simply wont cache. I can't speak for the onboard SATA but I havent run into any controllers in 3 years that havent worked out of the box on desktop hardware. "Is it possible to share the DVI, VGA, HDMI between VM's at the same time" = Nope. You'll purple screen the host as the VM's will be fighting for the cards memory. Maybe with some crazzy codeing you could but dont execpt to see that on cards under 1k. A cheap card will do look up 2 or 3 posts... For putting the machine to "Sleep" and using it. I havent tried it but I would assume it might not work out so well for stability of the host. Imagine having your brain shatched for about 20 minutes then handed back... My guess is the VM will notice activity on the card and start up. I would shut down the VM. I currently have a Win7 box and a Linux box sharing as long as there not on at the same time there isnt a problem at all. Makes for a fun time trying to change machines glad to have a tablet to power on the desktops lol. As long as the CPU supports IOMMU "AMD guys chip in dont think thats correct" those boards should be good. Worst case call the mobo manufacture ask if it supports passthrough.

Yup works for me. There are some people in early parts with older cards say that it didnt work. With the 7 series and some of the 6 series there's been several good results. All said it done I've spent $600 with re-useing some of the older hardware. Case, power, 2xNICS, Storage "4 SSD's".

Nope any duel slot card will cover it. The GPU I have is considerd a single slot but the fan still covers. It's kind of a bummer I really wouldnt mind using the 1x slot for a NIC. If the 5450 fits in a single slot you'll be good. So anything will the old style fan's "skinny" will be good to go.

I will admit the Asrock H77 Pro4-M is an Awesome board! It's the fastest one I've owned to date but there is one special thing to note it's a Mini ATX board so its short with only 3 PCI-e x8/16 slots and a PCI-E x1 slot "Covered with GPU". If your going for a small form factor I fully recommened this little guy. Its a very tight fit in a silverstone case it's less the 1cm from the power supply. It's given me no problems since I tossed it in the thread awhile back. The only thing I've done is add a much larger CPU heat sync and a slower fan. Went for a silent setup and have accomplished my goal. To the guy asking about 3 monitors it comes down to what you want to spend the cheep ($100) little 7750 that's in mine will do 3 but that's not in a 3D gameing setup but will do general videos "1080p" not a problem. Its also nice in this setup as it dosent require additional power so it runs soley off the PCI-e 75watt power only. For the USB as alot of people are asking its been said a few times... You Must pass the controller through you will not get single devices. I'm guessing it's something to go with hardware/memory mapping for the exact name of the function. As far as using an AMD setup I have a strange feeling it will work with almost anything build it the last year... After all ATI-AMD video cards seem to work that's telling me that AMD has put a considerable amount of time into passthrough but thats just a guess as I havent used and AMD CPU since the first gen Opteron's.

All power settings need to be left to on. The only one I've found that dosnt matter is the HD. Monitor should be always on along with NIC and USB. Also one thing to do just to save a tiny cpu time is to set the screen saver to Blank. That should be on all VM's servers and desktops OS's alike "Just so they lock". Keep in mind with VGA passthrough you will LOSE the console access in most cases and need to resort to RDP, VNC or your personal choise of remote desktop. And yup I've had the fail to suspend a few times more so with RDM for some odd reason. Never figured it out dont care to. I've just made a general pratice to disable power options "Not the windows service bad things come from that" to always leave on. If you want a generic script for a quick setup look for the Windows7 tweaks for VMware View. It shuts off all the uneeded services "Also disables theams, desktop manager, super fetch". Services that are useful in Win7 if you want Aero and superfetch is nice to have. Yup tools are always required for things to play nice.

On the Win7 on RDM mapping one. What steps did you take to from start to finish on setting up the VM? I have a Win7x32 on a RDM on a HP DL360 G6 and it works prefect with a FirePro 3k series "POS Card". The box at home is the last one I posted where I ran into problems with ATI 4xxx cards so got a 7750 for $100 and called it good. I did notice one thing that kept catching me up. When you do the driver install leave the Cat out of it at first! It seems to work quite well. I've been getting very lucky with starting with a Win7 box with 2CPU's and 2GB ram then doing all the config first. That's without the pci.Hole trick that seems to cause more problems when doing the install. After the driver is installed shutdown and add the value and kick the RAM up to what you need. I've done that general process about 15 times so far and it's been flawless each time. If the machine starts with extra RAM fell free to install the Cat and it should be fine after. Snap shot first... For WHS I've personaly never used it but I would assume it's the same as the Win7 box when it comes to the inital config. Also how are you trying to do the output DVI/HDMI?

Working Setup! ASRock H77 Pro4-M - BIOS 1.60 shipped version is 1.3 which has minor problems. Intel i7 3770 32GB Ram HIS 7750 - Leave the DVI adapter on and you shouldnt have the wired issues some have reported with display changing resolution. ESXi 5.1 works but no USB as everyone else has noticed. Confirmed for me.. Rolling back to ESXi 5.0 in a few for full use. Windows 7 x64 bit 2GB Ram and x2 CPU. This is without the pinHole trick. EDIT - Now 6GB and x3 CPU's with pinHole. Tips on this board... Set the video to PCIe. Set the shared memory to AUTO "Disable IGPU" and disable the onboard audio. And Enable VT-d "Off by default and firmware updates" Leave the catalyst control center out of the install it seems to help for some odd reason. Tested DVI so far and its flawless. EDIT - HDMI tested audio passed thru with no problems at all. No noticeable lag playing media files as of yet.