I've been playing around with ESXi for almost a month now. My first hurdle was getting my GPU to successfully passthrough and while a bit bumpy, I managed to get that fully working which was exciting.
Then, when working through setting up my VMs I started to notice that I had pretty mediocre performance on my spinning HDD's. I thought why would this be the case but after a bunch of research, it seems local storage and ESXi (out of the box) dont mix well.
First my setup:
Xeon E3-1230 v5
Gigabyte MX31-BS0 - Intel C232 chipset (mATX)
32GB DDR4 (2x16GB)
PCIe USB Controller passed through to Win10 VM
Nvidia GTX970 passed through to Win10 VM
1 x 120GB SSD
2 x 480GB SSD
1 x 3TB HDD
2 x 2TB HDD
I'd look into getting a hardware raid card but as it stands right now, I literally dont have space on my board. Call it poor planning/lack of knowledge on my part but the GPU and USB card are taking up the only spaces on the mobo for expansion cards.
I've been looking more and more around this site and there are some references to building a VM within ESXi that has a storage array setup that is then passed back to ESXi as a datastore but it seems like a key component of that is allowing the existing on-board SATA controllers to be passed through to the VM. Unfortunately it seems that my SATA controllers are grayed out in the vsphere web client for being available to passthrough...not sure why as I feel like I've read people successfully passing through their drives using a mobo with the same C232 chipset.
So to ya'll experts out there, any thoughts or recommendations on how I might proceed? Is there a more 'custom' way to passthrough the controller on the board by just editing the /etc/vmware/esx.conf file? That seemed to work pretty well for enabling the 'then grayed out GPU'.
Appreciate the time and help!
Then, when working through setting up my VMs I started to notice that I had pretty mediocre performance on my spinning HDD's. I thought why would this be the case but after a bunch of research, it seems local storage and ESXi (out of the box) dont mix well.
First my setup:
Xeon E3-1230 v5
Gigabyte MX31-BS0 - Intel C232 chipset (mATX)
32GB DDR4 (2x16GB)
PCIe USB Controller passed through to Win10 VM
Nvidia GTX970 passed through to Win10 VM
1 x 120GB SSD
2 x 480GB SSD
1 x 3TB HDD
2 x 2TB HDD
I'd look into getting a hardware raid card but as it stands right now, I literally dont have space on my board. Call it poor planning/lack of knowledge on my part but the GPU and USB card are taking up the only spaces on the mobo for expansion cards.
I've been looking more and more around this site and there are some references to building a VM within ESXi that has a storage array setup that is then passed back to ESXi as a datastore but it seems like a key component of that is allowing the existing on-board SATA controllers to be passed through to the VM. Unfortunately it seems that my SATA controllers are grayed out in the vsphere web client for being available to passthrough...not sure why as I feel like I've read people successfully passing through their drives using a mobo with the same C232 chipset.
So to ya'll experts out there, any thoughts or recommendations on how I might proceed? Is there a more 'custom' way to passthrough the controller on the board by just editing the /etc/vmware/esx.conf file? That seemed to work pretty well for enabling the 'then grayed out GPU'.
Appreciate the time and help!