Hi,

    I've been playing with Unraid 6 for a little bit now, I have unraid setup and i have an Arch VM up and running and everything is lovely but now i'm moving onto the next part of my plan and that's to virtualize a windows 8.1 machine and I've hit a bit of a problem.

 

I currently have 2 machines (well 3 but the HP machine is left over from an ESXi Lab) that i use for various things and i'm looking to get them down to 1 but none seem to support VT-d/IOMMU or more specifically the motherboards don't.

 

My Specs are below.

 

PC 1

 

Core i5 2500s

ASUS Z77-V LX

8GB DDR3

 

PC 2

 

FX 8120

ASUS Sabertooth 990FX R1.0

8GB DDR3

 

PC3

 

HP ML115

Opteron 1356

8GB DD2 EEC

 

All the CPU's support VT-x/AMD-V and the FX8120 and Core i5 2500S both support VT-d/IOMMU. The Sabertooth 990FX even allows me to enable IOMMU in the BIOS but UNRAID reports PCI pass through isn't supported the same as the Z77-V LX. My preference is to use the Core i5 2500S due to its low power usage and inbuilt HD2000 (you can pass through integrated HD graphics cant you?). So I've been doing some googling and i'm looking at getting an asrock Z77-Extreme4 so before i buy it i was wondering if anyone else is using it and if they can confirm that it does support VT-d and that it works fine in UNraid XEN or is there a better alternative out there that you can recommend?

quick question - why do you want to do passthrough to a vm?, just incase your unclear passthrough and intel vt-d is NOT required to have a windows vm running under xen, you only need intel vt-x.

 

if your looking to do gaming or video intensive stuff in your vm then fair enough, but thought i would ask the question before you spend a lot of time and money achieving this.

It's for a media centre PC so DXVA mainly from the GPU and a PCI-e DVB-S tuner card. Hopefully some gaming too in the future (but not with the HD2000). I'm also looking at adding a pfsense VM and i think i may need to pass through a couple of NIC's for that to work.

Ahh right fair enough, good luck with that from what I've heard getting pass through working is not easy, specific mobo required as well as CPU and GPU.

I noticed ironicbadager has a Asus P8H77-V LE listed under good xen hardware config with working pass through so i've gone for one of those.

beats me if I ever understand people who want to do gaming in VM.

beats me if I ever understand people who want to do gaming in VM.

 

Why?  This is a totally acceptable use case.  Not like you lose any noticeable performance when you do GPU passthrough like that.

 

My longer term goal is to do the exact same thing.  I want my main PC to be a workstation for work as well as a gaming system.  I don't want to have one OS for both.  I also want another OS for testing and development work that I can switch to using as well.  If you're not a gamer, I can totally appreciate the lack of understanding.

 

Sent from my LG-V500 using Tapatalk

 

 

I noticed ironicbadager has a Asus P8H77-V LE listed under good xen hardware config with working pass through so i've gone for one of those.

 

The only problem with ASUS is they can change things via a BIOS update. ASUS is my preferred MB, however they are very inconsistent on VT-D support and don't really promise anything so I've moved away from them for virtualization.

 

ASrock is a much better choice for a desktop board with consistent VT-D support.