Evening all, quick question.

Im trying to put togeather an esx server which supports PCI Passthrough of my Adaptec 3805 RAID Controller.

So far im heavilily leaning towards the M4A89TD Pro/USB3 but iv yet to find someone who can confirm that ESX reccognises the IOMMU feature of the board.

Can somone confirm if this works?

OR FAILING THAT,

can someone suggest some other AMD board which will support the PCI Passthrough feature.

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Additional Questions

1. Has anyone got an Adaptec 3805 working through PCI Passthrough/
2. Can you pass any PCI device through, PCI, PCI Express

I'd check on communities.vmware.com about the Adaptec and passthrough. I recall something about the card not working properly in some systems.

Iv already managed to install ESXi 3.5 and 4.1U1 with the card being reccognised under both installs as a datastore, the ability to do PCI passthrough is a nother unknown at this point

Has anyone ever put togeather a definitive list of M/B's which support IOMMU, i came accross one on Wikipedia and one on a KVM Virtualisation board, but after researching them, most turned out to be unsupported.

The M4A89TD Pro seems to have just as many people saying it is supported as those saying its not, so its a little confusing. Downloading the manual from the ASUS website, the BIOS doe NOT seem to have any specific options for IOMMU, there is a Secure Virtual Machine option (what that means, only ASUS can tell), but the communities seem to have major disagreements on this board having the facility or not !

I found a chap called James Leong (http://james.com.sg/2011/04/09/installi ... d-prousb3/) who installed ESX onto this board, but his plans for it were nothing like mine, so no tests were performed on the PCI Passthrough ability, im trying to get in touch with him to ask if he still has this system running to check

In the mean time, given the amout of places saying this board is compatible, im just looking for someone who brought one and has installed esx to post a screendump of the advanced settings page on vSphere Client lol proof please hehe

Fluxbox

P.S, main problem iv seen others having with the 3805 card is that they want to pass through the card to a virtual box, but then are surprised to see their datastore dissapears lol...

Guess it would be nice to just pass part of the RAID through, but in my case, the entire card is going through, dont care about ESX using it at all.

Fluxbox

I have pci passthrough working on an M4A89TD PRO. I have the motherboard's disk controller passed through to a freenas VM and a PCI DVB-T TV tuner card passed through to a linux VM.

I'll create a proper VMDirectPath HCL post with the screenshot.