ESXi Queries?

[Methanoid]

Some questions for the ESXi gurus. I've only used KVM/QEMU on Linux and under unRAID

1) Anyone done any passthrough of physical hardware like GPU, Soundcard? Do you need to stub or "blacklist" any hardware or is everything available for passthrough? Onboard USB controllers? Any issues with Nvidia cards (NV tries to block virtualisation generally) or with passing through a video card when it is the primary card on a system (I guess not since ESXi is happy to be headless)?

2) Can you specify CPU type (a useful tool in KVM is to be able to tell the VM that the CPU is xyz Intel model to allow an easier time when installing fussy VMs like OSX!) Or does it passthrough CPU cores "untouched" so AMD cores are identified as AMD (and OSX VMs would need hacked kernels!)

3) What about core/HT core pairings - ESXI seems to call all of them vCPUs. On LVM if you ran a machine on HT cores only it would run like a dog. How is that tackled?

4) The store for ISOs etc... Do the ISOs need to be there just for install? If so could I install ESXi on a 16Gb stick and use that for my ISO store as well and move ISO off after creating each VM?

5) Do VM HDDs support thin provisioning?

6) Can I import existing HDDs with existing data or must they all be wiped and converted to some VMware FS?

Thanks for any enlightenment you can offer

 

[Methanoid]

6) not directly as far as i know (unfermilliar with KVM/QEMU, but VMWARE have a Convertor you can install on the VM or remotely and conenct to the machine and V2V the machine into ESXI

Thanks.. I mean if I had a disk with NTFS (I don't, mine are XFS) could I import it as it is - ie the hardware and pass that untouched through to a VM or must I go thru an intermediary file system

 

[Methanoid]

The datastores are formatted using VMFS, you can possibly mount the XFS partitions to read from but I wouldn't run VM's using it.

Best bet is to copy anything off, reformat using vmfs and upload it back to the datastore.

Sorry, I wasnt being clear. I want to keep my existing data (movies etc) and import my disks into a VM. I'd obviously format the datastore for storing the VM image/OS itself...

 

[Methanoid]

Thanks, I think Semple follows me...

 

[Methanoid]

MORE questions for those experienced....
7) Under KVM it makes a big difference for video or USB card passthrough whether you have devices in their own IOMMU groupings and sometimes you have to add an ACS patch to enable separations. Is there any such restriction for ESXi?
8) ESXi is headless and can be controlled by web UI so I can passthrough ALL VGA cards in system yes?
9) How do you determine which VCPUs are real cores and HT pairs? This could affect performance of VMs for games BIG time
10) Can you pass through ALL VCPUs? Are no resources retained for the ESXi admin overheads?

 

[Methanoid]

7) dont know
8) Yes all our servers are headless
9) esxi does this... esxi and games are not two things id put together...
10) you can install 50 dual core vms on a quad core host if you want (we are over provisioned by about 500%)

Thanks... answer to (7) is I believe that ESXi does need IOMMU groupings... which is a problem on most of the new X399 boards and most X370, generally Intel boards work better it seems