SSD 750 ESXi Passthrough?

[Zarathustra[H]]

Hey all,

Does anyone know if this works?

I need a new L2ARC cache drive for my ZFS guest, and I figured why not go PCIe?

Of course, for this to work, I'd have to be able to pass it through to my guest.

Has anyone successfully done this?

 

[ToddW2]

You might get a different answer if you post on 5 more forums

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

You might get a different answer if you post on 5 more forums

Well, when you are dealing with something relatively rare that most people are unlikely to ave done with a specific piece of hardware, increasing the potential number of eyeballs you might hit increases your likelihood of finding someone who has actually tried it

 

[DeChache]

Why pass it through? Just put a VDMK on it and use it that way.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

Why pass it through? Just put a VDMK on it and use it that way.

ZFS very strongly prefers raw disk access. I COULD create a raw disk passthrough VMDK on my datastore, but I fear that hack is not as reliable as using VT-D to present the guest with the PCI device.

 

[DeChache]

For L2ARC I wouldn't be that concerned about it. All a VDMK is is a container anyway. RDM are perfectly reliable use them all the time at work to mount SAN disks in VMs. Pain to work with but no real issues with them.

 

[dilidolo]

I had problem with it before. Pass-through works for 750 and I can use the disk in Windows VMs, but Solaris based VMs don't work. Not sure if there is still issues as I gave up.