GPU Passthrough?

S

SpeedyVV

Supreme [H]ardness
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I am curious about GPU passthrough.

Right now I run Windows 10 + VMWare workstation.

This allows me to do some gaming if I am bored.

If I were to run ESXi, would I be able to install Windows 10 and run that with GPU passthrogh and game on that VM instead?
 
If everything is compatible and configured correctly, yes.
I set this up as a project a ways back and it works GREAT. I don't know about Win10, I did mine back when Windows 7 was still the latest OS. I have a post around here somewhere with my specs and how I did it. There should be quite a few other users as well. I highly recommend doing a lot of research on your hardware first as compatibility was quite hit and miss at the time for me. I don't know about what all is available today however.

====EDIT====
This guy's blog helped me out a whole lot along the way.
 
koolaidkitten said:
If everything is compatible and configured correctly, yes.
I set this up as a project a ways back and it works GREAT. I don't know about Win10, I did mine back when Windows 7 was still the latest OS. I have a post around here somewhere with my specs and how I did it. There should be quite a few other users as well. I highly recommend doing a lot of research on your hardware first as compatibility was quite hit and miss at the time for me. I don't know about what all is available today however.

====EDIT====
This guy's blog helped me out a whole lot along the way.
Click to expand...

awesome DUDE!

I'll start drinking the KoolAid pronto! ;-)
 
Just wanted to say win10 works pretty well with my 270x. The only problem I've been having is that if my gaming VM goes to sleep I loose sound running through the HDMI but only if I've got nothing playing even though it did not act that way with win7. If I've got nothing running and I move the mouse the monitor comes on but no sound til I go to device manager and disable then re-enable the sound part of the video card but if I've got say fallout 4(runs great btw) just paused or minimized this doesn't happen, same with a minimized VM running in the background as long as it has a virtual sound card even if nothing is playing on it. It basically seems like anything with an open sound channel seems to keep it alive even thought the monitor turns off after 10 minutes and I jiggle the mouse and we're back in business.
 
Any recent success stories with nV cards (like GTX 970/980) on ESXi (Intel preferred) ? I tired few years back on ESXi 5.0 and 5.1 with now success.
 
ChristianVirtual said:
Any recent success stories with nV cards (like GTX 970/980) on ESXi (Intel preferred) ? I tired few years back on ESXi 5.0 and 5.1 with now success.
Click to expand...

I'm interested as well.

I'm planning on sticking a couple of GeForce GT 720's in my ESXi server, passing them through to guests, and using those guests as HTPC's by using HDBaseT hdmi over ethernet and USB over ethernet devices to my TV's.

Is it just a matter of passing through the GPU to the guest like with every other hardware I've passed through in the past?
 
Zarathustra[H];1042030714 said:
I'm interested as well.

I'm planning on sticking a couple of GeForce GT 720's in my ESXi server, passing them through to guests, and using those guests as HTPC's by using HDBaseT hdmi over ethernet and USB over ethernet devices to my TV's.

Is it just a matter of passing through the GPU to the guest like with every other hardware I've passed through in the past?
Click to expand...

Should be, but when I did mine only AMD/ATI was supported at the time.
 
koolaidkitten said:
Should be, but when I did mine only AMD/ATI was supported at the time.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I'm having a terrible time finding information about Nvidia pass through.

I wonder if it is possible with a consumer Nvidia card at all. Any info here would be appreciated.

AMD isn't an option for me as I will be using Kodi in Linux, and while AMD and Intel drivers allow for some video acceleration, Nvidia is still the only good video acceleration solution under Linux.

It's kind of the reason I am doing this in the first place, as my little hacked Chromebox with its onboard Intel GPU is really starting to piss me off...
 
I wish it would run with nV; I tried three years ago, two years ago and gave up. i think it works with the expensive computing cards (Quadro) but not with GForce
[conspiracy]limitation on purpose[/conspiracy]

I still would love to build my distributed computing with GPU fully on ESXi to have the chance running Win and Lin at the same time (sure with two different cards)
 
ChristianVirtual said:
I wish it would run with nV; I tried three years ago, two years ago and gave up. i think it works with the expensive computing cards (Quadro) but not with GForce
[conspiracy]limitation on purpose[/conspiracy]

I still would love to build my distributed computing with GPU fully on ESXi to have the chance running Win and Lin at the same time (sure with two different cards)
Click to expand...

I'll just leave this wonderful link here for you


http://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/hacking-nvidia-cards-into-their-professional-counterparts/
 
Shockey said:
I'll just leave this wonderful link here for you


http://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/hacking-nvidia-cards-into-their-professional-counterparts/
Click to expand...

Yeah, if not for the fact that PCB soldering is damned near impossible to pull off unless you have experience doing it professionally.

The parts are too damned tiny, and if you slip you ruin everything.

I wouldn't even try it. I'd probably go through 100 video cards just to get one right, and at that success rate, just buying the quadrotor to begin with would be a much better deal. :p
 
Zarathustra[H];1042031685 said:
Yeah, if not for the fact that PCB soldering is damned near impossible to pull off unless you have experience doing it professionally.

The parts are too damned tiny, and if you slip you ruin everything.

I wouldn't even try it. I'd probably go through 100 video cards just to get one right, and at that success rate, just buying the quadrotor to begin with would be a much better deal. :p
Click to expand...

I'll join you in the boat of don't want to try it and why i didn't try and explain any of it :p
 
So its pretty much certain that the GT 720's won't pass through in ESXi?

That's a bummer, because they were perfect for my application.

They are 8x cards so I wouldnt have to cut anything to make them fit, and they are low power and have all the support for video acceleration I need (except HEVC...)

I could always go with the Quadro K420's if they could be passed through, but they use more power, have to be cut to fit in the 8x slots in my server board, and they don't have an HDMI slot, and I'm not even sure if I can adapte the DP+AUDIO out to HDMI with audio.

It's stuff like this I hate about Nvidia. Their errant pedantry in keeping shit closed, exclusive, and locking shit down so it can only be used the way they want people to use it.

Pisses me the hell off.

It has potentially taken this project from being cheap and doable to not being doable at all at any price.
 
Last edited:
Zarathustra[H];1042031710 said:
I could always go with the Quadro K420's if they could be passed through, but they use more power, have to be cut to fit in the 8x slots in my server board, and they don't have an HDMI slot, and I'm not even sure if I can adapte the DP+AUDIO out to HDMI with audio.
Click to expand...

Or not.

Nvidia in their wisdom only support pass through on high end quadrotor boards, like the K2000.

There's no way in hell I'm going to buy one of those just to playback HTPC video...

This seriously pisses me off. Something that SHOULD just work with 100% of all pci devices (including every single one I've ever tried) must be intentionally blocked by Nvidia.

It's like they are intentionally trying to poke serious hobbyists in the eye.
 
I'm not sure why anyone would resort to soldering, flashing, or buying extremely expensive cards, etc when all you have to do is change the hypervisor you use.

Here's the old How-to I did:

Guide: GPU Passthrough Using KVM + LVM2 + Ubuntu Gnome - From Beginning to End

I've been putting it off, but the steps to do this in Fedora now are really easy. However, you can use that guide to test your idea at least until I get around to doing another one.
 
kac77 said:
I'm not sure why anyone would resort to soldering, flashing, or buying extremely expensive cards, etc when all you have to do is change the hypervisor you use.

Here's the old How-to I did:

Guide: GPU Passthrough Using KVM + LVM2 + Ubuntu Gnome - From Beginning to End

I've been putting it off, but the steps to do this in Fedora now are really easy. However, you can use that guide to test your idea at least until I get around to doing another one.
Click to expand...

Yeah I have my entire home "production" system set up around my ESXi server. It handles TV &DVR, media center, firewall, router, wifi, video surveillance, NAS, online backups, some public servers, etc. etc. I'm up to about 15 guests now and have hundreds if not over a thousand hours invested in getting everything set up EXACTLY the way I want it at this point.

Switching thypervisor just isn't an option. I don't even upgrade major ESXi revisions until they have been out for several months and my research has made me comfortable that the upgrade won't break anything.

I have notjing against alternative virtual machines out there (except maybe Hyper-V. I wouldn't trust anything complex to any Microsoft product). At this point I am pretty much as locked in to the ESXi ecosphere as I could possibly be.

When I started virtualizing my server 5 years ago, ESXi was the only matrue game in town. Switching at this point would be so much work as to negate the cost of a couple of Quadrotor cards, if there were any at the GT 720 level, but there aren't. The ones that support pass through are bigger GPU's using more power than I want.

All I need are single slot wide, preferably x8 PCIe so I don't have to modify anything, low power cards which will only ever be used for video decode acceleration.

AMD is out, because of their poor support on Linux. Intels on board GPU's and their Linux instability in video decide are the reason I want to do this, but I can't because Nvidia are being pissy.
 
Zarathustra[H];1042033359 said:
All I need are single slot wide, preferably x8 PCIe so I don't have to modify anything, low power cards which will only ever be used for video decode acceleration.
Click to expand...

With that many machines I can see the concern sort of. Back in the day it used to be extremely hard to move to other hypervisors. Now? All of them can read and convert to pretty much any format you need. Still I get it. I wouldn't want to redo 15 machines.

As for an 8x video card, I've been looking for that exact thing. Ironically I came down to mixing and matching a variety of cards both consumer and professional in order to fit into the limited profile. That really is THE only reason I've come up with the list of cards I'm using. It's actually kind of sad because many cards that are in 16x format really only use 8x. I also don't get why even HTPC cards take up 2 slots. Fans don't need to be 2 slots on an HTPC card or in a 16x format.
 
Yeah, if it weren't for the pass through the GT 720 would be perfect. 8x, low power, single slot width. The only thing its missing is HEVC support.
 
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