I'm new to the Forums.  But I wanted to share with  everyone my experience with ESXi and unRaid.  

my goal was to build a NAS for the home computers and also a virtual gaming machine.  

 

My rig:

CPU: intel i7 7700K

MB: Asus H270 Plus Prime

GPU : nvidia evga GTX 960

RAM: 16 GB's

 

I verified all settings were enabled in BIOS for vT-d and Hyper threading.  

 

1st setup was unRaid and a windows 10 with GPU passthrough.  It worked really well  and was very easy to setup.  

But I was hung up on the purchase price of unraid.  So I decided to explore other options.  I use to use nas4free but got tired of the upgrade process.  

It did not have GPU passthrough like I wanted.  At least I didn't try it, from what I was reading is that virtualbox doesn't support it.  

 

So I was like we use ESX and vSphere at work,  plus I'd been wanting  to learn VMware anyway.  

I found the awesome website that allowed you to create custom ESXi installation ISO's but ultimately the only version I could get working was 5.5.  

 

From what I was reading on the internet is that GPU passthrough  is very difficult to accomplish with ESXi and Nvidia cards.  Boy where they right.  I never ended up getting the GTX 960 working correctly.  Always ended up with error stop code 43 in device manager.  Apparently nvidia drivers can detect if an OS is virtualized.  I tried all the flags the other sites recommended but never got it working.  

 

I ultimately gave up on ESXi and reloaded the unraid and re-setup the windows VM again and man I can't tell you how incredibly simple this was.   

 

I will be purchasing unRaid Plus very soon.  

 

 

Edited October 3, 20178 yr by TechnSide2

Hello and welcome.  It's great to hear your experience.  I feel like it's worth paying for software that enables me to do something I can't easily do with free software, or saves me time by thoughtfully packaging the functionality I need and making it easy to use.  Life is busy and my time is worth something ;).