I'm no stranger when it comes to building computers (been at it for over 20 years) but this one problem stumped me.
[back story]
Last summer I bought a pair of E5-2670 (since they were so cheap) from ebay, and also picked up a ASRock EP2C602 Mobo to consolidate my file server/ESXi server/router/and a another test machine.
I decided to run everything under ESXi 6.0 and everything installed and transitioned just fine into one large case with plenty of drive bays, and expansion.
I then decided to virtualize a GPU so I can run an instance of Kodi to run my projector.
I had no end of troubles with GPU passthrough on ESXi 6. Lots of PSOD (purple screen of death) where the ESXi os would hang, and take down all the current running VMs.
I then downgraded to ESXi 5.5 thinking that maybe the latest ESXi version wasn't supported, but the troubles followed. As soon as I passed a GPU, upon first boot of the VM with the GPU, the server would freeze. However sometimes the system ran well with a GPU passed through for either a few hours, or a few days, but the end result was always a PSOD, and all the VMs would crash.
With no VM using the GPU, ESXi was happy as punch. No problems whatsoever.
I lived without GPU passthrough until last fall (didn't run the VM with the GPU), but really wanted to play with that feature (to virtualize a few machines that needed GPUs).
Last December I installed UnRaid since it had a good following and passing GPUs to VMs seemed trivial.
Unfortunately, I tried everything I could think of to get the VM to run reliably with a GPU under UnRaid, but had no success.
[\back story]
So here we are today.
I have moved all the VMs to separate machines and the E5-2670 machine is not being fully utilized at all at the moment due to frustration.
In the ESXi days, I was trying to pass through a Quadro 4000 which is on the approved list for ESXi 5.5. With UnRaid I also tried a GTX 560 Ti
When I purchased the E5-2670 CPUs I made sure to grab the SR0KX versions (and not the SR0H8 since they have a IOMMU bug)
I have gone through all the BIOS settings, and turned on all the virtualization and IOMMU settings availabe
At this point I'm trying to think of ways to diagnose my problem for the least amount of wasted money:
1. Do I buy a couple more SR0KX CPUs and try them out?
2. Do I buy some 2011-v2 CPUs instead?
3. Buy another motherboard? (this was the most expensive part of the initial upgrade)
Any thoughts or advice?
[back story]
Last summer I bought a pair of E5-2670 (since they were so cheap) from ebay, and also picked up a ASRock EP2C602 Mobo to consolidate my file server/ESXi server/router/and a another test machine.
I decided to run everything under ESXi 6.0 and everything installed and transitioned just fine into one large case with plenty of drive bays, and expansion.
I then decided to virtualize a GPU so I can run an instance of Kodi to run my projector.
I had no end of troubles with GPU passthrough on ESXi 6. Lots of PSOD (purple screen of death) where the ESXi os would hang, and take down all the current running VMs.
I then downgraded to ESXi 5.5 thinking that maybe the latest ESXi version wasn't supported, but the troubles followed. As soon as I passed a GPU, upon first boot of the VM with the GPU, the server would freeze. However sometimes the system ran well with a GPU passed through for either a few hours, or a few days, but the end result was always a PSOD, and all the VMs would crash.
With no VM using the GPU, ESXi was happy as punch. No problems whatsoever.
I lived without GPU passthrough until last fall (didn't run the VM with the GPU), but really wanted to play with that feature (to virtualize a few machines that needed GPUs).
Last December I installed UnRaid since it had a good following and passing GPUs to VMs seemed trivial.
Unfortunately, I tried everything I could think of to get the VM to run reliably with a GPU under UnRaid, but had no success.
[\back story]
So here we are today.
I have moved all the VMs to separate machines and the E5-2670 machine is not being fully utilized at all at the moment due to frustration.
In the ESXi days, I was trying to pass through a Quadro 4000 which is on the approved list for ESXi 5.5. With UnRaid I also tried a GTX 560 Ti
When I purchased the E5-2670 CPUs I made sure to grab the SR0KX versions (and not the SR0H8 since they have a IOMMU bug)
I have gone through all the BIOS settings, and turned on all the virtualization and IOMMU settings availabe
At this point I'm trying to think of ways to diagnose my problem for the least amount of wasted money:
1. Do I buy a couple more SR0KX CPUs and try them out?
2. Do I buy some 2011-v2 CPUs instead?
3. Buy another motherboard? (this was the most expensive part of the initial upgrade)
Any thoughts or advice?
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