Esxi 5.1 pci passthrough broken

[HellMind]

I got a purple screen when I start up a vm with a pci device

With Esxi5 was working fine.

I tested it with 2 vm on different hosts ( but same hardware)

i7 2600 32gb

mb: dq67sw

What can I try

[FastLaneJB]

From my understanding you only get USB 3 if you connect a device to your client machine and pass that to the guest. You don't get USB 3 speeds directly from the server.

http://www.tinkertry.com/esxi-5-1-sort-of-supports-usb-3-0/

Also there's all sorts of other reasons to pass a whole USB 3 card through including allowing you to use USB devices which ESXi won't pass through because it doesn't support that type of device. Or if you've already passed through a piece of hardware you can no longer add or remove USB devices to that VM without shutting it off.

Ultimately it works fine in 5.0. They haven't added server side USB 3 speeds from ESXi 5.1 and they've broken the whole USB controller passthrough. So this isn't a step forwards but a huge step back.

I'm just glad they've added support for Server 2012 to ESXi 5.0 so I can keep using that for a bit longer. Hopefully they will eventually fix this problem.

[seertenedos]

The main reason i need passthrough is the passthrough the keyboard and mouse to my vm that is getting the GPU passed to it for direct output. In 5.0u1 the only way to do this is to pass through the whole usb controller.  Since you can't do that in 5.1 does anyone know if it is possible to pass through the keyboard and mouse as usb device or am i just stuffed and unable to upgrade till they fix it?

[arad85]

Can't you just add them to the machine using the ESXi machine editor? I have some low bandwidth peripherals attached in this way and they work fine.... I wouldn't have thought they needed to be physically passed through given the performance requirements.

[seertenedos]

It is not a performance issue.  Atleast in 5.0u1 and earlier keyboard and mouse never show up in the list of usb devices you can passthrough that is why most jsut passthugh the controller to get around it.  Personally for me if i could jsut passthrough the keyboard and mouse itself it would be ideal and maybe you can do that in 5.1 but i have not seen anyone mention that it is now possible and i have not upgraded to 5,1 due to this so i can't test it.  If it was possible i would upgrade as it is the only thing holding me back as my Esxi box is used as 2 desktop computers with mouse/keyboard and screens as well as running a number of servers etc without screens and keyboards.

[FastLaneJB]

It's not possible to Passthrough keyboard and mouse still on 5.1. HID devices aren't allowed to be passed through.

Also if you go that route when you've already got a device passed through like a VGA card in your case or any passthrough device then you cannot actually edit the USB (or any) devices plugged into the VM without shutting it down first. So if you wanted to attach a USB Hard Drive or pen drive that would require the VM to be shutdown each time. This is hardly practical.

I don't understand why some cannot understand despite people saying many times why some people need this. It worked on 5.0U1, its now broken on 5.1. It seems strange that your defending VMware from fixing a bug in their software that they've introduced.

Personally from my reading I believe it's a bug which got introduced into the Linux kernel which has since been fixed in later revisions. So to fix this I think it requires VMWare to update the kernel or back-port the fix. This might be viewed as too risky for a small patch process as it could bring in other problems and would need to be heavily tested. I do accept that this functionality is probably only used by a small minority of their customers. So I don't actually think they will fix this on 5.1. I think the first time we might see a fix is in 6.0 at the earliest which is a shame. That is assuming they ever bother to fix this.

The problem in my opinion is that other hyper visors aren't quite up to the level I'd like in other areas to warranty switching when 5.0 U1/2 works perfectly. However if VMware doesn't fix this and the OS support of 5.0 falls behind I suspect KVM / Xen to have improved enough to make switching to them possible.

[arad85]

Not defending, just trying to provide a way forward.

I too am looking at KVM/Xen....

[FastLaneJB]

OK fair enough.

A regression in features when it's not mentioned that it would do so is to me a bug. VMWare came out and said they'd fix the PSOD pass through issue before year was out and they hit that target. It would just be nice to know if they intended to do anything about this bug and a rough timescale. Instead they seem to be staying silent.

KVM appears to be focusing heavily on pass through currently as well as adding in important features like snapshots, live migrations and so on. The progress currently from their camp is impressive.

[srwsol]

Has anyone in this thread with a support contract opened a ticket about the USB controller pass through problem?  I have the essentials bundle and you don't get any access to technical support with it unless you pay a couple hundred dollars per incident, and I really don't feel like paying a couple of hundred dollars for the "privledge" of reporting a bug to them.

[MSTROWD55]

I am experiencing the exact same problem.

I am using a Star Tech USB 3.0 PCI controller that I am trying to pass through to a VM runing Server 2008 R2 that is used as our Backup Exec Server. I want to attach external USB drives to be used as targets for off site storage. I have a call opened with VMWARE Technical support to help with the problem. If I find a solution, I'll keep you guys posted.

[Indie]

Any news about this?

I'm wondering if I have to downgrade to 5.0 to have my USB backup running again...

[MSTROWD55]

I opened a call with VMWARE and this is indeed not supported in 5.1. You will have to downgrade to 5.0 to acquire this functionality. The engineer that I worked with suggested that we complete a feature request to have this turned on for the current version. Here is the link to do that. I need this functionality too, and according to him, this kind of thing happens a lot faster when it comes from the user base.

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1002123

[Indie]

Unbelievable. Any information about why VMware dropped the support for PCI passthrough?

I used your link and send a feature request to have PCI passthrough enabled again.

[KristijanL]

I am using this feature for HID devices as they cant be passthrough with USB passthrough.

thank you for all the information, i have used the link and requested this feature to be enabled again.

[srwsol]

I submitted the reqest as well, but I have to say that it's unbelievable that they would silently remove a capability that existed in a previous version.   That's completely unacceptable.

[Dave_Mishchenko]

There are a few different issues on this thread.  If you're experiencing a PSOD with ESXi make sure you're patched your host - http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2039030.

[vt-vmwaresjo]

Can anyone with this issue (USB Host Controller Passthrough) check if it's working with the latest Update  http://kb.vmware.com/kb2043967 (Build 1021289)

I just tried it with a HP DL360 G7 and the controller didn't vanish after the required reboot to enable passthrough for the USB Host Controller.

On the other side we've a call open on that so maybe we'll also get official confirmation.

[srwsol]

That would be great if they fixed it.  I read the patch documentation and there was no mention of it, so I didn't bother upgrading to 5.1 again and applying the patch just in case. 

[vt-vmwaresjo]

That it's not in the release notes, made me wonder too...

For me it just happened by accident, when I was creating different logbundles for the call, involving installing Esxi many times, and then I made the full Remediation with the updatemanager to the latest build and gave it another try.

I can't test at the moment if it would also work with a device connected at the host, since my test server is some hundreds kilometers away, but that the passthrough device is kept across reboots seems to be a good sign

[xnisupport]

Thank you for posting this. I only had one server that was capable of DirectPath that I could test with right now. It has a Cisco USB sound card (for external audio for a CUCM). The USB ports persisted through a reboot (5.1 + the latest patch) and I was able to add a PCI device and saw a sound card get added to the server. I'll be doing more extensive testing when I can get downtime on the servers to confirm USB hard drives work but the fact that I see this sound card might be confirmation enough.

[xnisupport]

I was able to get some remote maintenance time on some servers. I never used the USB DirectPath pass-through before so hopefully I don't restate obvious things about the original functionality of this.

1. USB 2.0 hard drive successfully passed through and achived a sustained 100+MBytes/s through the duration of a 4GB file.

2. The pass through was attempted on several hosts. Some required a reboot before I could use the USB controller directly, some didn't (I don't know what the difference once). The one that didn't was a Cisco C220 M3 and had no devices connected, but the port on that server that had something connected required a reboot. Post the reboot the C220 M3 with the hard drive still had the indication a reboot was required but it worked fine. The HP DL360 G7 that I tested last night with the sound card required a reboot.

3. The PCI Device could not be altered while the guest was on (I'm pretty sure this is how it was).

Things I could not test due to being remote or simply forgot until I couldn't test further:

1. Disconnecting and reconnecting the USB device to verify it reconnects properly. If I remember, I will post about this the next time someone is on-site at the NOC.

2. Adding a passthrough PCI device with the virtual machine on. I will test this today or tomorrow when I have a maintenance window on another server with a USB device hooked up.