Okay, iv found a few people mentioning the problems with Adaptec cards and PCI Passthrough.

Has anyone found a solution to this.

I have an 99FXA-UD3 board from Gigabyte, which officially supports IOMMU and is enabled in the BIOS, vmWare ESX has picked this up and allows me to pass the Adaptec 3805 RAID card to a windows XP Host I quickly set up, but as soon as i power up the VM something happens to the card.

The XP VM detected the card and prompted me for drivers, which i have installed, but the card comes in up device manager as saying it cannot start !

visual inspection of the card at this point shows the lights flashing, standard idle time typically has the status lights pulsing from one side to the other, but as soon as the XP client boots, these lights stop pulsing and 4 of them begin flashing, at the same time all 8 of the drive activity lights come on and remain constant !

Has anyone had any luck passing Adaptec RAID cards through to VM hosts???

Fluxbox

I have successfully passed my Adaptec 6805 through to my guest OS.

Motherboard is an Intel DX58SO2. Check out my post in the Whitebox forum on this site.

Check that you are running the latest adaptec firmware and driver.

I've heard from Adaptec that they do not support or even test passthrough. If you're able to get it to work reliably, then don't patch!!



This was support case #130805-000034 . I opened it because we were seeing a hang on aac driver load with a 6805 in RHEL5 and 6 after a warm boot of the VM. New firmware, new card, new drivers [30200] all 'round.

Good luck!