[rant] ESXi 6.0 not working with GPU passthrough for me

[outsider]

I've recently built a new system around those cheap E5-2670 CPUs from ebay, and the plan was to combine my standalone box of UnRAID as well as the ESXi 5.1 box into one system running ESXi 6.0

For the most part ESXi 6.0 works well enough, but I've had nothing but trouble passing through a nvidia Quadro 6000 GPU (which is on vmware's approved list). Lots of PSOD (purple screen of death) crashes when the VM with the GPU would start up.

Sometimes it would work, and other times it would hand the whole system.

I read many forums, and discussions on psod, and tried various tweaks (both in bare metal bios as well in the vmx config file of the VM) but nothing was producing consistent results.

At one point I was sure I had fixed the problem (no more crashes or hangs when the VM with the pci passthrough VM would start) and then a week later, nothing I did would start that machine anymore.

 

I was starting to suspect that the CPUs I bought were crap, or that the ASRock ep2c603 mobo was not working properly.

I reinstalled ESXi several times and updated to latest patches in an effort to have a fresh install, but no avail.

 

Tonight in a last straw desperate attempt to try anything, I installed a trial version of ESXi 5.5. So I went back one version from 6.0 to 5.5

So far everything is working as expected. Imagine my surprise when there was no crashing, no system hangs, no psod.

More testing is required, but things are looking up for a change.

 

Who knew that ESXi 6.0 was in fact the problem.... (at least for me)

 

Anyway, this was more of a rant for me, but if you have similar problems with ESXi 6.0, give version 5.5 a try.

For me, I don't think I'm going to miss the features that version 6.0 brings as my ESXi home lab is pretty basic.

 

oh, and yes, UnRAID is one of the VMs that runs on this system (figured I should at least state that I'm using unraid)

 

[ashman70]

I don't know if you are aware of this or not, but ever new major release of ESXi Vmware deprecate's their hardware support, so the drop things off the supported hardware list. Its quite likely that you'll never be able to run 6.0 on your hardware though. Were you using a 6.0 ISO with update 1? Was there a particular reason you wanted to run 6.0? Or is it just because its the latest?

[outsider]

Interesting.

I knew that each release removes hardware support, and I've cooked drivers in the past into the installation media to get cheaper hardware to work (in the 5.0, and 5.1 days) but everything seemed to work with my current server hardware system.

 

I only installed 6.0 (with update 1) since as with most software the latest version is usually the one you want to have since it's the most mature, and feature rich.

I'm just happy that 5.5 works so far.

[ashman70]

I've still got customers on 5.1 because they had so many problems with 5.5 and issues with 6.0. I have no issues on 5.1 at all, its rock solid stable as I know some builds of 5.5 were as well.

[BobPhoenix]

I'm still on 5.0 myself.