AMD CPUs & ESXi Hardware Passthru

[Frozennova]

Its time to rebuild my home server with something with hardware passthrough.

This has lead to a new motherboard (Asrock 970 Pro3) but I'm now drawing a blank when it comes to processors.

Will an Athlon II X2/3/4 suffice or will I need to go for an FX-series processor?

Looking to keep both costs and power consumption down which has lead to me to be looking at something like the Athlon 250e, a dual core is fine for my 3 relatively small VMs as its been managing fine on a Sempron X2 190 for the last 12 months.

 

[Frozennova]

Update on this.

Asrock Pro3 arrived today. Swapped with the current Gigabyte board and DirectPath I/O is shown as supported and allows me to pass through hardware. Not tested yet but will install windows to have a play over then next couple of days.

 

[Frozennova]

I don't need the grunt offered by a bulldozer chip.

At the moment the server runs a FreeNAS VM, and two lightweight debian vms that handle sickbeard, couch potato and torrents, then a second that runs a webserver.

Will install a windows vm tomorrow or Saturday to confirm 100% the passthrough works.

If it does then £35 for a mobo and £20 for a cpu that allows full DirectPath I/O is a bargain.