ESXi 5.5: PCI Passthrough error from VCenter but not .Net Client.

BlizzardX · 17 May 2015 at 20:03

Hi,

I've run in to an interesting and annoying problem. I'm passing two DVB-S2 cards through to a windows 8.1 VM. Using the client without connecting to Vcenter it all works fine and the two cards attach ok. As soon as I set the host to be managed by Vcenter, attaching the cards comes with this error "PCI passthrough device ID (0x-73d3) is invalid".

I've googled lots but nothing is pointing me in the right direction.. I do not know why Vcenter is treating this differently to the .NET client?

Any suggestions? anyone else had this?

Cheers,

Chris

BlizzardX · 20 May 2015 at 07:24

Wanted to add that as soon as I remove the host from vCenter, the passthrough devices pass through fine and the system boots. Adding the host back in to vCenter then retains the settings and allows web control... Strange stuff.

Has anyone noticed this in vCenter 6?

BlizzardX · 20 May 2015 at 11:10

Hey thanks rotor,

Yeah I did wonder that, but strangely since I'm now managing the cluster through the C# client attached to the vCenter instance, passthrough attached without error and the vm seems to have booted fine.

BlizzardX · 20 May 2015 at 22:33

Its just a tad weird that using the web client it fails with a different device id to the actual device, but using the fat client works fine. vCenter appears to be a necessary evil for creating somethings but at least the windows client can do what I need! And you're right, only the server is on the HCL list, not the pci devices.