• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Xen home use

B

bobstone

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 3, 2005
Messages
361
Hello all.

I was thinking of upgrading my primary desktop (Main in my sig, used for gaming, programming, and testing) to a 4970s and a new Motherboard. I wanted to install Xen server and then pci passthrough my 780gtx and some usb ports to a Win 8.1 VM so that I can use it like a normal local desktop while still being able to run VM's 24/7 in the background.

I would use a local ssd for the desktop replacement 8.1 VM and iscsi for all the other VM's

I was hoping someone could tell me if the following Motherboard supports VT-d ( most of the manuals say they do, but I have found that some still do not support it correctly.)

GIGABYTE GA-Z97X-SLI

also FYI I know there are different easier ways to do this like just use virtualbox or vmware workstation. But I want to learn more and have my desktop be a VM for easy recovery if something happens.

Thanks
 
TBH and totally personal preference, I never liked the Asrock brand. no real reason. and ya I wrote the numbers wrong on the CPU, I did mean the 4790s...

If no one is sure about this motherboard can anyone recommend an Asus or Gigabyte board within 40$ of this one that supports VT-d and has a m.2 slot?

Thanks
 
why not use ESXi over Xen as the hypervisor ?

i also had a bad feeling about Asrock before, i had one for 3 years now and i can only say good things about it. It became my n1 mb choice.

i know you cannot passtrough Nvidia gpu whit esx don't know about Xen, pretty sure its the same tough
 
technobro said:
why not use ESXi over Xen as the hypervisor ?

i also had a bad feeling about Asrock before, i had one for 3 years now and i can only say good things about it. It became my n1 mb choice.

i know you cannot passtrough Nvidia gpu whit esx don't know about Xen, pretty sure its the same tough
Click to expand...

You can pass Nvidia with Xen but it is a real pain in the ass and require a lot of patching.
 
I tried Xen and ESXi with PCIe Passthrough, don't bother with it. I'm using KVM with VFIO and a custom built kernel. I've got it working with my GTX760, no modifications to the card. Just took a lot of learning. With XEN and ESXi, you still will run into the Code 43 with any NVIDIA card that is not a Grid or Quadro.

I've learned a lot over the last 3 weeks, but it works. I've virtualized both my Gaming Machine and my FreeNAS box, both with different cards passed through.

Gaming Machine:
  • gtx760
  • Creative Sound Blaster Z
  • 1 motherboard USB controller
  • 1 motherboard Ethernet controller

FreeNAS:

  • LSI SAS2008

Checkout this thread: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1270311#p1270311

I used Arch, but others have used Fedora 21. Arch is neat, but at work I deal with RHEL.

But if your set on ESXi or Xen, i've modified a GTX465 in a Quadro 4K that I don't use - if you want to buy it :)
 
Last edited:
If u want to go with ESXi, go AMD. Other than that, AMD has its own issues, more so than NVIDIA. One thing I liked about my NVIDIA cards is their support for FLR. It allows them to survive reboots better.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top