Disable ESXi passthrough on SATA controller

intel-vt-xpassthroughsatavmware-esxi

I have a newly built ESXi server with two SSD's hooked up to the motherboard primary SATA controller. Everything was working until I made the mistake of enabling passthrough on that SATA controller. Now, ESXi will reboot & come up complaining it doesn't have any data stores configured:

enter image description here

Each time I'll go in & uncheck passthrough for that controller & reboot again, but it keeps coming back up enabled. Not sure what to do from here?

I tried temporarily disabling VT-d in BIOS, but that didn't help. Passthrough showed disabled in ESXi, but I still got the persistent storage error.

Best Answer

Why not just reinstall, which would reset the configuration.

Related Solutions

ESXi onboard SATA passthrough Solaris vm cannot see disks

Okay I fixed it:

The SATA Controller needs to be set to AHCI (this is done in the BIOS).

After that was set I was able to see the drives in my virtual machine.

Hopefully this might help someone.

VMware ESXi – Booting from a Passthrough LSI 2008 SAS Controller

It's quite possible to host a virtual guest with a passthrough controller, but it's not possible to boot from one. I've documented this configuration here in the past.

I don't think this question would appeal to a large audience, though. This is a pretty esoteric request.

The purpose of the passthrough controller is to provide dedicated access to a hardware resource, bypassing VMware. However, even in this situation, your VM needs to live somewhere. That means the VM folder, .vmx files, logs, RAM .swp files, etc. need to be located somewhere where VMware can see them. For me, that means VMware-accessible storage separate from the passthrough device. The LSI 9211 SAS controller is still perfectly usable for data disks and non-boot disk purposes.

DirectPath I/O PCI configuration for LSI 9211-8i controller

Virtual machine configuration with passthrough device configured

zpool listing showing the drives connected to the passthrough controller

[root@Davalan ~]# zpool status -v
  pool: vol1
 state: ONLINE
  scan: scrub repaired 0 in 1h44m with 0 errors on Sat Jul  6 13:12:06 2013
config:

        NAME                               STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
        vol1                               ONLINE       0     0     0
          mirror-0                         ONLINE       0     0     0
            scsi-35000c5003af99fa7         ONLINE       0     0     0
            scsi-35000cca0153ec2d0         ONLINE       0     0     0
          mirror-1                         ONLINE       0     0     0
            scsi-35000cca01540e340         ONLINE       0     0     0
            scsi-35000cca01540e298         ONLINE       0     0     0
        cache
          ata-STEC_M8IOPS-50_STM000136649  ONLINE       0     0     0

Best Answer

Related Solutions

ESXi onboard SATA passthrough Solaris vm cannot see disks

VMware ESXi – Booting from a Passthrough LSI 2008 SAS Controller

Related Topic