I recently purchased an new AMD Opteron 6128 8core cpu and a Supermicro H8SGL-F Serverboard with 4 8GB DDR3 1333 ECC/REG DIMMS for 32GB of ram.
The new Opterons and the AMD SR5650 + SP5100 Chipset Support IOMMU natively now. There is an option in the BIOS to enable or disable IOMMU.
The problem I am having is that when i enable this feature and boot into ESXi4.0 or ESX4.0 it tells me that "Host does not support passthough configuration" in the advanced hardware tab. So I am unable to get it working... however AMD showed a demo at CES with their new opterons and one of their 5XXX Series GPU's using IOMMU and VM Directpath to pass the video card directly through to a VM for 3d rendering so I know it should be supported but i can not get it to work...

Does anyone have a possible solution or are you experiencing a similar problem?

Please help this is a test system and we are looking to deploy a large scale VM deployment with these new CPU's this summer and we need Direct hardware passthrough.

Thanks for any input.

I just ordered the exact same hardware, and I hope this will be fixed. Have you tried this (from VMWare's homepage):

Verify IOMMU Is Enabled After ESX Is Booted
Use the --list option of the esxcfg-module command from the ESX service console or the
vicfg-module.pl command from the vSphere CLI to verify if IOMMU (VT‐d or AMD IOMMU) is enabled.
For details about this command, see “VMkernel Module Manipulation with vicfg‐module” in the vSphere
Command‐Line Interface Installation and Reference Guide.
If IOMMU is not enabled, refer to the hardware manual for your Intel or AMD machine to learn how to enable
VT‐d or AMD IOMMU.

Best regards

Grisen

Have you tried this (From VMWare's homepage http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/micros ... 2092557220):

Verify IOMMU Is Enabled After ESX Is Booted
Use the --list option of the esxcfg-module command from the ESX service console or the
vicfg-module.pl command from the vSphere CLI to verify if IOMMU (VT‐d or AMD IOMMU) is enabled.
For details about this command, see “VMkernel Module Manipulation with vicfg‐module” in the vSphere
Command‐Line Interface Installation and Reference Guide.
If IOMMU is not enabled, refer to the hardware manual for your Intel or AMD machine to learn how to enable
VT‐d or AMD IOMMU.
?

Could help to determine whether it's a bios issue or a VMWare issue...

Best regards

Grisen

I called supermicro and they made an update to the boards bios! It is now working flawlessly. Make sure you have at least version 1.0a