GA-990FXA-UD5, SATA passthrough

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rtangwai

[H]ard|Gawd
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Jul 26, 2007
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I currently use a Gigabyte UD5 motherboard paired with an AMD 8350 CPU and 32GB RAM for my ESXi 5.1 host. I have 2 VMs on it, Ubuntu Server 12.04 and Windows 7. I built a FreeNAS box using an old CPU and motherboard to experiment with, but it has become unstable (probably a bad motherboard). I would like to transfer the FreeNAS to a VM on my ESXi host.

The question is this: Do I have to buy another controller (like a M1015) to plug in the hard drives, or can I cheat and passthru the onboard SATA controller? Normally I would say it can't be done because the SATA controller drives the datastore drives, but the UD5 has a second independent SATA controller. If I put the datastore drives on the second SATA controller, is it possible to then passthru the main SATA controller to the FreeNAS VM? My ESXi boots from a USB key so I don't have to worry if the second SATA controller is bootable or not. The reason I don't want to use the second SATA controller for the FreeNAS VM is that it has only 2 ports.

I'm asking now because my datastores are on hard drives connected to the main SATA controller now and it's a pain to move them. I'll do it if it has any real chance of success, but if it won't work then I'll have to break down and buy a M1015.


Thanks in advance for any helpful advice!
 
I have never had much luck with passing one of the onboard controllers though and not the other.
Never had an issue passing PCIe cards through though.

Your best bet is to give it a go if you have some spare drives? As I have found with ESXi and unsupported hardware is what works for someone else might not work for you.
 
I've passed through the onboard sata controller to my freenas vm since freenas doesn't like raid controllers. No issues. Since 5.1 I've passed through every imaginable device and everything has been fine.
 
holden j caufield said:
I've passed through the onboard sata controller to my freenas vm since freenas doesn't like raid controllers. No issues. Since 5.1 I've passed through every imaginable device and everything has been fine.
Click to expand...

You're having better luck than me than, getting USB to passthrough is been a painful process in 5.1. I actually downgraded to 5.0 for a while because of it.
 
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