vt-d/vmdirectpath w/ vmware only on esxi?

[acesea]

Is vt-d and direct device assignment available on any of vmware's windows based virtualization products ie server?

I am unable to find documentation on this and do not see where to enable it within the gui.

 

[NetJunkie]

Is vt-d and direct device assignment available on any of vmware's windows based virtualization products ie server?

I am unable to find documentation on this and do not see where to enable it within the gui.

No. Only on vSphere.

 

[DuronClocker]

With that said, at least using VMware Player, I can pass-through USB devices to the VM without issue. I know that is something I cannot do in ESXi unless I have IOMMU hardware.

Granted, this isn't an internal device on something like the PCI bus, but worth knowing regardless.

 

[acesea]

Thanks for the info.

Looking forward to a non bare metal vm solution that will pass pci to a vm on top of win 7. I expected vmware server or virtualbox by now to offer the advantages of the several year old vt-d spec.

 

[defuseme2k]

With that said, at least using VMware Player, I can pass-through USB devices to the VM without issue. I know that is something I cannot do in ESXi unless I have IOMMU hardware.

Granted, this isn't an internal device on something like the PCI bus, but worth knowing regardless.

You can pass through USB without using vm directpath i/o in 4.1. It was one of those new flashy features . You can even vMotion to another host while it is connected (serial works too), but the bad part is if you power off / back on you need to do it on the host where it is physically connected. In an enterprise environment I'd go with something a little more hip, like a digi port server/anywhere usb.

KB article linkie...

 

[DuronClocker]

You can pass through USB without using vm directpath i/o in 4.1. It was one of those new flashy features . You can even vMotion to another host while it is connected (serial works too), but the bad part is if you power off / back on you need to do it on the host where it is physically connected. In an enterprise environment I'd go with something a little more hip, like a digi port server/anywhere usb.

KB article linkie...

Very cool. I had tried this with ESXi3.5 and discovered it wasn't supported. This will allow me to toss a small VM on the new machine as a print server for our laptops.