January 4, 201412 yr I'm under a little bit of a time crunch for purchasing some components to upgrade my server. I don't want to put anymore money into it if I won't be able to run virtualization with hardware passthrough. Is there any quick and dirty way to find out if my hardware will successfully passthrough the hardware? Is compatibility for hardware passthrough different between the different virtualization options, Xen/KVM, ESXi? I know the CPU, motherboard and BIOS all need to support VT-d. All my hardware does show that VT-d is supported and the option is in the BIOS. But I have a feeling the doesn't guarantee success. My CPU and Motherboard: Motherboard: Supermicro X7DWN+ CPU: Intel Xeon L5420 - 2.50GHz Quad-Core
January 4, 201412 yr Post what you are trying to pass through and see if anyone else has successfully done so. I.e. The IBM raid controller many of us have because it does for sure. Sent from my SGH-I727R using Tapatalk 2
January 4, 201412 yr Author Right, forgot about that. SAT2-MV8 Raid Controller Cards My build is here: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=31026.0 Everything I have found points to hardware passthrough working with the hardware I have, just wanted a way to confirm it. Of course I could just follow one of the great install guides here but they are a bit long (only cause I'm a little short on time) . I'm going to try and get one of them going. I was just curious if there was a short cut to just test out my hardware.
January 5, 201412 yr Right, forgot about that. SAT2-MV8 Raid Controller Cards My build is here: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=31026.0 Everything I have found points to hardware passthrough working with the hardware I have, just wanted a way to confirm it. Of course I could just follow one of the great install guides here but they are a bit long (only cause I'm a little short on time) . I'm going to try and get one of them going. I was just curious if there was a short cut to just test out my hardware. I had unRAID running on my X7SBE with 3 AOC-SAT2-MV8s on pass through in ESXi (4.1 or 5.0 don't remember which now - sorry). It worked just fine with one exception: the access was slower because I also had a PCI card plugged into the remaining PCI-x slot so that slowed the access to PCI speeds. But it did work. I had to upgrade the BIOS on my X7SBE to 2.0 to make pass through work correctly so be prepared to upgrade or downgrade your bios and see what the VMWare forums say for your MB. The CPU was a Q9550S and I had 8 GB of ECC memory installed. The unRAID VM worked flawlessly but the Win7 x86 VM had problems. I was passing through a PCI card for the Win7 VM for local recording drives for SageTV and 2 PCIe tuner cards. The Win7 VM would lockup every 2-6 weeks for some reason but the unRAID VM just kept chugging along without any problems. I probably wouldn't have had to reboot once in the 6 months I ran this way if it wasn't for the Win7 x86 VM lockups. Most times I could just restart the VM without rebooting the computer but occasionally a reboot of the computer was necessary to get the Win7 VM to boot up again properly. I've never used Xen or KVM so have no idea if my X7SBE MB would work with it or not. Hopefully this rambling post tells you want you want to know.
January 5, 201412 yr The simplest way to absolutely confirm your hardware works okay is to just try it ESXi is free ... so just prepare an ESXi flash drive; and create a single VM and confirm you can pass your controller through. THEN you can buy any additional hardware you want to use with the VMs you plan to create. However, since you've already confirmed that you have Vt-d support in both the CPU and motherboard, and Bob's already confirmed that your SATA card works with passthrough, then there's really not much doubt about it working.
January 9, 201412 yr Hi Guys, My 3 year old unRAID machine is on an Intel mobo with a Celeron CPU... I doubt it will be compatible. I started looking int hardware that support Vt-d by looking on the wiki's and everything listed is basically old hardware that one cannot find. It would be awesome to start a thread that lists currently shipping hardware one can get at Newegg or Amazon... also some choices when it comes to pricing/performance. The X7SBE motherboard mentioned above is a bit steep at $250 on Newegg. Or is this the nature of the VT-d beast...? Many thanks, H.
January 9, 201412 yr Hi Guys, My 3 year old unRAID machine is on an Intel mobo with a Celeron CPU... I doubt it will be compatible. I started looking int hardware that support Vt-d by looking on the wiki's and everything listed is basically old hardware that one cannot find. It would be awesome to start a thread that lists currently shipping hardware one can get at Newegg or Amazon... also some choices when it comes to pricing/performance. The X7SBE motherboard mentioned above is a bit steep at $250 on Newegg. Or is this the nature of the VT-d beast...? Many thanks, H. VT-d capable MBs are usually server grade MBs for Intel - so expensive. With AMD you might get by with a cheaper desktop board but Intel was easier for me to get one I know works. I would never recommend the X7SBE MB and virtualization if only because for me that would mean at least ONE windows VM and as I said above that didn't work well on the X7SBE. Also the X7SBE uses PCI-x slots so is REALLY old technology now. PCI-x slots were really only available on server class MBs. After all we are on v3.0 of PCIe slots now which was the successor to PCI and PCI-x slots. I currently have 1 X9SCM-F and 2 Tyan S5512GM2NRs with SandyBridge so two generations back. I think the X9SCM-IIF is recommended over my X9SCM-F now. I've seen posts from some who have used the Haswell SuperMicro X10SLM(I think) boards which would be the newest.
January 9, 201412 yr Hi Guys, My 3 year old unRAID machine is on an Intel mobo with a Celeron CPU... I doubt it will be compatible. I started looking int hardware that support Vt-d by looking on the wiki's and everything listed is basically old hardware that one cannot find. It would be awesome to start a thread that lists currently shipping hardware one can get at Newegg or Amazon... also some choices when it comes to pricing/performance. The X7SBE motherboard mentioned above is a bit steep at $250 on Newegg. Or is this the nature of the VT-d beast...? Many thanks, H. this is a good page for iommu mobo compatibility - http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/VTd_HowTo
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.