[Solved] ESXi Passthrough Issue with Backplane and HBA Configuration

Notice: Page may contain affiliate links for which we may earn a small commission through services like Amazon Affiliates or Skimlinks.

roswellian

Member
Oct 18, 2013
77
10
8
I am new to working with backplanes and currently trying to achieve drive passthrough to my virtual machine (VM) under ESXi 8.0. I have an onboard HBA LSI 3008, which I've flashed to IT mode. This HBA is connected to the SAS backplane BPN-SAS3-846EL1.

I've encountered an issue where enabling passthrough of the onboard HBA LSI 3008 causes ESXi to get stuck at booting with the message "SMP_BootAPs." However, if I disconnect the backplane from the onboard HBA, ESXi boots properly, and the HBA successfully achieves passthrough.

My question is, can we enable passthrough of a backplane when it is attached to an HBA? My intention is to passthrough all the attached drives to my VM. If this is possible, I would appreciate any insights into what might be incorrect with my current setup.

Thank you for your assistance. I've been working on this throughout the entire weekend and any help would be greatly appreciated.

Update: I finally nailed down the problem, and it is PCIe USB card. If I remove the card, everything works as expected.
 
Last edited: