ESXi 8 GPU Passthrough

[TeleFragger]

I have had my ESXi box powered off for a long time and decided to get it back up and running.
Total reinstall. Installed 8.0 U3e and this is a home lab where I know just enough to make it work.

Was going to go Proxmox as a guy at work likes but installed it and so much harder to work with initially than ESXi. Decided to go back to ESXi.

Installed it, had a Zotag GTX 1060 and couldnt get passthrough to work for just 1 vm. I run an admin VM that I like doing passthrough. Removed that card and put an RTX 2070 in and same deal.
I am lost and curious what I need to do to allow.
Not allowing me to attach files... but sayhs NVIDIA CORPORATION TU06(GeForce RTX 2070) but is greyed out... also says Passthrough - not capable.

 

[DavidWJohnston]

Make sure VT-d is enabled in the BIOS, some boards have a separate option for it.

The card needs to be in its own IOMMU group for passthrough to work, and the whole IOMMU group needs to be passthrough'd - Some boards have the ability to control the IOMMU, or using another PCIe slot might help. Did you add a new PCIe/NVMe device that might be sharing an IOMMU group with the GPU?

You might be able to see if the GPU is in its own IOMMU group in the ESXi GUI by filtering or looking at the PCIe hierarchy to see if it's at the root, or grouped with other things.

Set the onboard video to be your primary device instead of auto

I've also heard some GPUs that previously worked in ESXi 7 no longer work in 8 for some reason - If it worked before, you could try 7 or 6.7 just to see what happens.

 

[TeleFragger]

Make sure VT-d is enabled in the BIOS, some boards have a separate option for it.

The card needs to be in its own IOMMU group for passthrough to work, and the whole IOMMU group needs to be passthrough'd - Some boards have the ability to control the IOMMU, or using another PCIe slot might help. Did you add a new PCIe/NVMe device that might be sharing an IOMMU group with the GPU?

You might be able to see if the GPU is in its own IOMMU group in the ESXi GUI by filtering or looking at the PCIe hierarchy to see if it's at the root, or grouped with other things.

Set the onboard video to be your primary device instead of auto

I've also heard some GPUs that previously worked in ESXi 7 no longer work in 8 for some reason - If it worked before, you could try 7 or 6.7 just to see what happens.

Wow, cant believe it.

Intel VT was disabled. Also turned on SR-IOV while in there too.

View attachment 723884

but now that is done, I get it... guy at work loves proxmox too and told me to just take the plunge. Thus I will!!!!

I have a gtx 1060 but decided to use my RTX 2070 vs selling it... so onto that now!
Thanks for your input!

 

[TeleFragger]

This weekend I was all over the place. I am not a linux guy so ESXi was just easier all around. I kept trying to keep it going.
datastores easy to setup, networking on my 10gb easy, vms easy EXCEPT I struggled to get vTPM working. Tried and tried and eventually found a thread where someone pointed out what could be an issue and it was for me, then i crashed out my vCenter so threw the towel in.

Jumped over to Proxmox and started.
Got so much working, even vTPM, RTX 2070 in my vm, all was going great then something happened and ended up with some journal catalog issue or something. Many posts about happened after video passthrough. I dont need passthrough but just wanted to... so reinstalled all and kept plane standard video. back up and running.