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Thread: IOMMU virtualization

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  1. #2
    Xtreme Member
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    I run an ESXi box using direct hardware passthrough of a HBA controller to a VM. (Full story of my machine here)
    You need hardware support, but also it needs to be enabled in the BIOS. As you said some hardware configs support it, but they left out BIOS support to enable it.
    Best bet is looking for proven setups online and choose from that. Less risks. A lot of people use this feature like me, with a VM that runs ZFS. So it might be worth it to google in that direction.

    As far as I know ESXi is the only hypervisor that supports this. And except for very very specific use cases no Enterprise will use this feature because it removes flexibility from the VM (eg. you cant vmotion it etc etc).

    Theoretically what you want is possible. But you will need 1 Graphics Card per VM. As you can only assign a hardware passthrough device to 1 VM and this also makes it in-accesible to the ESXi host.
    Also I am not sure how USB passthrough works for ESXi, so that might be tricky. On my own box I can see 2 internal usb controllers that I could passthrough directly to a VM if I would want. But I never tried this.

    There are tools for attaching one set of keyboard/mouse to multiple machines. Hardware KVM or for example this -> http://synergy-foss.org/

    Edit:
    As for the K processors not supporting this. I am guessing they don't want people to run OC on hypervisors as it will probably introduce a whole world of trouble.
    So probably just a support kind of thing.
    Last edited by MadMike261; 03-16-2013 at 03:09 AM.

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