The_Dave's Posts

derickso: Mind if I send you a PM? I don't want to derail the thread but am curious about a few things. I though about including my HTPC (Win 7 - MCE for live tv with HDHomeRun tuners and XBMC for stored content) as a VM but was cautious about stability and such. jhusen: Maybe I did not give the sytem enough time to do the switch over and was being to impatient Then again, I was doing this until 2 in the morning as I don't get too much time otherwise with the wife and baby. As for passing the wrong USB controller, I did that already. I installed ESXi on a USB stick and the first one I tried was the lucky one with the install on it.

No, I already set the host console vga driver to not be used by setting only to display the desktop on monitor 2. What I am reffering to is the physical card. You are correct about the message. When I tried assigning the only card in the system at the time (the 5870), ESXi would boot up and I would see the last message show as "cnic_register loaded successfully". IIRC it did not finish loading though. Again IIRC it seemed that the host stopped at that point and I could not connect to it. I will try again tonight or tommorow. If it works, I can then merge my existing server and gaming tower together until I get some more coin saved to get a new x79 mobo and core i7 with ECC ram together. I can't ditch ZFS and Windows filesystems don't do what I want nor does a raid array under Windows. So now I will have a super fast and resiliant filesystem backing my VM's and providing storage to my lan while still able to manage from a Windows machine and game with! Is it common for the VM's not to be able to sleep with an assigned VGA card? I guess I should just let the VM run all the time? Not a big deal I guess since the server will still be on anyways. Thanks all and thanks VMware! I did not want to try and learn/setup Xen under Fedora or something like SmartOS and make its management my 2nd job. ESXi is so easy and great to use!

Just wanted to throw my $.02 in. I was able following this thread to get my AMD 5870 passed through to a Win 7 guest using a P55 board and an i7 860! The only issue I see is when I put the machine to sleep it doesn't appear to re-init the VGA card upon waking up so I need to shutdown the machine. Other than that, it is stellar. I installed Borderlands 2 and gave it a go and it runs smooth as can be with maxed settings. Now I just need to try and up the ram from 2GB to 4 or 8 for Windows. I set it low as I read there was an issue with ESXi in here but didn't recall the fix (PCI hole?) for yesterdays install. I left the VM console vga card in the guest and set to only show the desktop on the 2nd monitor. Here are the system specs: ESXi 5.0 u1 (will try with 5.1 here in a bit) Intel i7 860 Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD4P (I had to contact Gigabyte to request a special BIOS file which enables VT-d) 16GB of ram XFX OC'd AMD 5870 passed through USB hub passed through Nvidia GT220 for the host console Here was my process: Flashed new BIOS image Enabled VT-d by going into new hidden menu (CTRL+F1 <- not mentioned by Gigabyte) Install ESXi making sure VT-d shows as enabled Install Win7 as a guest Install ALL updates, DirectX, .net, java, etc Set the card and USB to be passed through to the guest and restarted ESXi Installed the ATI drivers (everything except the CCC) Rebooted the VM and voila!! Question: Is there a way to set ESXi not to require a vga card for output? This way I could pass a vid card and my HBA to guest. I am using ZFS as my storage backend and would like either ZFSGuru or OpenIndiana to house my ZFS pools and export out for VM and other storage as well as running a gaming VM.