ESXI 6.5 - Cant passthrough my GPU

[Rexima]

Hello guys,

i have problems with my esxi installation.
I want to passthrough my Nvidia GTX 970 to my Win10 VM, i set up the flag hypervisor.cpuid.v0 = "FALSE" and when i look at the Task Manager, my VM is not recognized as Virtual Machine anymore.

When i restart my Host and start for the first time my Win10 VM, my displays are going online for about 5 seconds and than they turn off.

Edit: The GTX970 stops in the VM with the known Error Code 43. I found ways how to transfer your card into an business one, but you need to do something with your transistors and i wont damage my card...
I tried to use KVM/Qemu and it works very good, but i can't activate my PCIE Soundcard (Sound Blaster ZXR). So i thought to give ESXI an chance, but yes im stucking with the GPU Passthrough.

 

[Ch33rios]

Having just gone through this fun trial and error task, it is pretty dependent on your hardware. Can you provide additional information about the hardware in use? CPU, mobo, etc?

Also, take a look through THIS THREAD which I posted a while back about this exact issue. After trial and error I realized that the issue was not only the exact order of operations I had going on (follow @marcoi 's advice) but also a different motherboard I was attempting to use which didn't want to give up the control of the card.

 

[Rexima]

Thanks for your answer

Thats my system:
Mainboard: Asus Z-97 Deluxe
CPU: Intel Core i7-4790k
GPU 1: Nvidia GTX970
GPU 2: Nvidia GTX960
RAM: 16GB DDR3

I also followed @marcoi "tutorial" but it didn't worked for me.
I tried a few things, like install with and without this parameter "hypervisor.cpuid.v0" and so one, but nothing helps.
An friend of mine got his VM running with this command. I think it must be the mainboard who wonts...

In KVM it works great, i could passthrough my GPUs without any pain.

 

[marcoi]

did you try with only one gpu?

 

[Rexima]

Yes i did.

 

[marcoi]

under the bios Graphic configuration, do you have primary display set to pcie and gpu multi monitor disabled?

 

[Rexima]

Multi Monitor is disabled and primary Display is set to IGPU

 

[marcoi]

try setting the primary to pcie, i know i had to do that to get my card to work under esxi.

 

[Rexima]

Okay, i will give it a try. Do you know if i can passthrough an Nvidia GTX 960 to an OSX vm? I heared that the command hypervisor.cpuid.v0 = "FALSE" doesnt work under an osx vm.

 

[marcoi]

i haven't tried OSX VM so have no experience getting that to work.

 

[TLN]

I've tried to pass-through the videocard for OSX. OS started, but was unable to make it work.
Now I got another proper videocard. Will see how it works soon: I'm getting PSU this weekend, and case next week.

 

[Tom5051]

You could try ESXi 5.1U1 and see if that works. VMware changed a bunch of stuff in 5.1U2 that caused a lot of issues with passthrough. Being an enterprise product, passthrough is not something generally used in a production environment. Hence the lack of support for it.

 

[alex1002]

System F628R3-RTB+
Motherboard X10DRFR
2. Intel® C612 chipset
4. Expansion slots: 1 PCI-E 3.0 x16 (LP) -used for my 10GBE
1 PCI-E 3.0 x8 (Micro Low Profile) -seems like Supermicro connector

 

[Tom5051]

I checked the specs for that MB and it supports software raid only.