Hi All
First foray into ESXi here I'm combining a whole lot of PCs I have sitting around into VMs running on a secondhand HP proliant server I'm setting up as a home lab.
I've got ESXi 6.5 setup fine - many times over as I've tried every version since 5.0 trying to get a Hauppauge 2200 PCIe tuner card working in pass-through so I can virtualise my media server. I've have learnt a lot in the process - definitely way more complicated than I was expecting but after much trial and error and tweaking settings in passthru.map and vm config it's now running great on the latest ESXi.
My next challenge is getting some sort of GPU support in the VMs so I can virtualise the Windows PCs I have here. I've read a lot on this but a lot of the material is aimed at either corporate setups running GRID GPUs or gamers who game directly on the server. My server will be headless. I'm hoping someone can point me in the right direction and I've tried various things without much success. Here is what I'm trying to achieve:
- Virtualise win7 and win10 machines without losing 3d acceleration, aero etc
- I need decent 3D accelerated desktop performance, but not expecting to run high-end games or run CAD software although it would be nice if I could run some games that may need modern directx versions.
- It's a home lab so budget is limited. I can't afford GRID GPUs and enterprise ESXi licenses. I'm willing to buy some second-hand graphics hardware as needed.
- I was hoping to control the VMs using Fusion 8.5 or Workstation 12 as I already licenses for both these setup on a mac and windows laptop I won't be virtualising.
- I have no vsphere server, I'm connecting directly to the ESXi host
Based on that what would be the recommended approach for setting up 3d accelerated machines?
Here's what I've tried:
- I've installed an older nvidia consumer pcie card (GeForce 9400 GT) I had lying around in the host as a proof of concept to try out vDGA.
- I've set the onboard graphics in my HP server as primary and the nvidia card as secondary so I can allocate it out to the VM without losing my ESXi console, iLo etc
- I've set the card to passthrough, masked the hypervision in the VM settings, msiEnabled = FALSE and got the drivers loaded in the guest
- The card is detected fine in the guest, no BSOD. I can't use the card though without plugging a monitor into it. Once I do that, I can use it. However I only get 3D acceleration on the desktop that is output on the monitor attached to the card. The desktop shown on my vmware fusion/workstation session is treated as a monitor running on the svga adapter and is not accelerated.
- I've tried all sort of things - delaying VMWare tools startup, disabling the SVGA adapter, unistalling the SVGA driver in VMWare tools, etc I can't seem to get a VMWare session running on the nvidia display adapter. I'm not sure if it's something I'm doing wrong? I have a feeling the gamers are okay with this as they use the monitor(s) attached to their video card?
- I then tried disabling the secondary card in the server and using the nvidia card as the primary. I lose the ESXi console part way through booting the host when the card is reassigned to pass through. Within the VM I still end up with the vmware svga adapter. This time though the nvidia driver seems to be onto me and I get the code 43 error - it's somehow detecting the vmware driver when it wasn't before. Disabling this adapter gets the nvidia driver to load but my session still isn't accelerated it behaves more like a remote desktop session.
So one question I have at this point is whether running a VM using Workstation or Fusion to connect to an ESXi host will even give me a session capable of hardware acceleration? If not, what is the solution? If so, what am I doing wrong?
Sorry about the long post appreciate you taking the time to read it.