Cheap GPU for ESXi passthrough?

[RyC]

@RyC,
Could you share how you got the Nvidia 2000 passthrough working in esxi 6 with the Intel S2600 motherboard? was it the ONLY GPU card passthrough?
I cannot get more than 1 GPU passthrough to a single VM, with any permutation I tried (eg AMD + AMD, AMD + Nvidia)

Unfortunately it seems to be a limitation with the S2600CP board and ESXi. I'm able to pass a whole bunch of AMD and Nvidia (quadro) cards, but with only one physically installed at a time. Looks like you posted in my topic about it Intel S2600CP dual GPU passthrough issue

 

[epicurean]

Yes I did. Still trying to find a solution for it.
But 1 single Nvidia 2000 in esxi 6 is alright?

 

[RyC]

Yes I did. Still trying to find a solution for it.
But 1 single Nvidia 2000 in esxi 6 is alright?

Yes, a single Quadro 2000 works in esxi 6 (and 6.5) for me

 

[zer0sum]

All ATI-GPUs work for passthrough. Only NVidia locks consumer-GPUs out, and let only pro-GPUs to be used for passthrough...

I have recently tried an ATI RX470 and RX480 and had absolutely no luck getting GPU passthrough working on ESXi

Tried on ESXi versions 5.5, 6.0 and 6.5 but had no luck, even on the older versions.
Starting the VM that had the GPU passthrough would freeze the whole box and make it unresponsive to keyboard input and even pings across the network

 

[TLN]

Strange.
I got HD7750, HD8490 and R9 280x and all three work just fine.

 

[epicurean]

@TLN,
Were you able to get all the 3 (HD7750, HD8490 and R9280X) passthrough to 3 different VMs simultaneously?

 

[TLN]

@TLN,
Were you able to get all the 3 (HD7750, HD8490 and R9280X) passthrough to 3 different VMs simultaneously?

Sure. I haven't put my HD8490 (I have low profile bracket only ;( ) in my new box, but I was running Mac OS X on 7750 and Windows 7 on R9 280X simultaneously just fine. You can run more VM's like that for sure.

 

[Harry P. Nyce]

I recently stumbled across some Craigslist "treasure" and had been looking for a single node, all-in-one compute host to begin my wannabe homelab adventures... discovered a gorgeous older Cisco C240-M3 and had to have it. It came with three (3) nVidia Quadro 2000, but i'm not able to pass-through the GPUs using ESXi 6.5 (free version) as the checkbox option appears to be greyed out. However, i am able to properly pass-through the HDMI audio. Initially thought it was me (and my lack of VMware experience) that was the problem, but i've recently come to suspect it may be an unsupported card in version 6.5 -- honestly, due to limited experience i have no idea if i should be testing older versions of ESXi or giving myself three extra PCIe expansion slots for something more useful.

 

[Harry P. Nyce]

Oh gosh, apparently i've got more reading to do -- using ESXi 6.5 (U1) i'm now able to properly toggle the GPU passthrough. However, i made the mistake of attempting to passthrough all three of my old nVidia Quadro 2000 cards to a Win10 VM as my first attempts towards virtualizing a desktop / workstation environment. Sadly, this seriously borks my machine and yields a:
`P_CATERR_N: A catastrophic fault has occurred on one of the processors: Please check the processors' status.`