USB controller Pass-through Supermicro X11SSH-LN4F ESXI 6.5

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am4593

Active Member
Feb 20, 2017
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So I've literally had this problem for like a year. I just absolutely cannot get the onboard USB controller for this Supermicro X11SSH-LN4F to show up in ESXI as a pass-through option. It just doesn't appear in the list of pass-through hardware. I own a number of other Supermicro X11 boards and have had the same issue on them. Has anyone else been able to do this with any Supermicro X11 Motherboards? I've had this issue with both ESXI 6.0 and now 6.5. I've also looked at online forums for information about this and find very little. That said i understand that many people dont like these E3 xeon boards.
 

Netwerkz101

Active Member
Dec 27, 2015
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By chance ... are you booting ESXI off a USB drive attached to the same controller you are trying to pass through?

It's been years since I attempted to pass through anything ..can't remember if it would show up at all or showed up greyed out.
 

am4593

Active Member
Feb 20, 2017
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Laugh now but I actually boot ESXI off of a samsung SM961 128gb m.2 drive. a few months ago I got angry about my boot flash drives drying and having to re-install so I just put ssds for all my boot drives in all systems. Seriously I lost 3 flash drives in about a month period.


But I did have that thought about devices attached to the controller so I disconnected everything including keyboard mouse and still not showing up.

I have booted these boards in the past off of usb drives with the same result. I have also owned with the same issue X11SSM-F and X11SSL-CF

I have tried changing bios settings for the usb controller but no success. like I said i've struggled with this for a while and had decided I would just wait till upgrading from esxi 6.0 to 6.5 to see if the issue was fixed. I have a usb 3 add in card which passes through fine but I have this board in a 2u chassis and I need the pci slot availability that the add in card is taking.

Other pieces like the onboard intel 210 nics and even intel hd graphics do appear available for passthrough. As I think about this though the SATA controler does not show up for pass through.
 

marcoi

Well-Known Member
Apr 6, 2013
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Gotha Florida
i had issues with different MB passing the USB controllers as well. Finally I just buy this for any server i need usb passthrough
Amazon.com: StarTech.com 2 Port PCI Express PCIe SuperSpeed USB 3.0 Controller Card with SATA Power - Dual Port PCI Express USB 3 Adapter PEXUSB3S23: Computers & Accessories
I get the one with etron chipset, it never gives me issues with esxi and always runs at full usb3 speeds.

The other option, if the device is greyed out is to hack the esxi configuration and manually enable it as pass-through then see if it works in a vm.