Hello.

I've got two Intel Quad GbE cards (each have the 82575GB chips). I select them to be marked as passthrough devices then reboot ESXi 5 as required.

The issue is that the "Advanced Settings" screen still says "Changes made to some of the devices below will not take effect until the host is restarted."

The cards worked fine before. I ran /sbin/firmwareConfig.sh to reset things. Only thing I haven't done is reinstall. Other cards were able to be successfully passed through. Well, the Intel SRCSASJV RAID (aka. LSI 8888ELP) sorta works but that's a different thread.

System info: Asus P8B WS, Xeon E3-1235, ESXi 5.0.0.

I'm fairly new to VMware so please let me know what else I can try. My searches ended up with either too little or too much.

Thanks,
Brad

I found the answer after seeing the following message in /var/log/vmkernel.log:

2011-11-04T19:35:32.913Z cpu0:2626)WARNING: PCI: 3557: 000:006:00.0: Cannot change ownership to PASSTHRU (non-ACS capable switch in hierarchy)

It appears that a PCI-e switch on the quad NIC does not support Access Control Services. VMware KB article 1036811, http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1036811, says:

Access Control Services (ACS) was introduced by the PCI-SIG to address potential data corruption with direct assignment of devices. Passthrough of a PCIe device to a virtual machine, using DirectPath I/O, is disallowed by the VMKernel if the device is connected to a switch that does not support Access Control Services.