vt-d required to use FC HBA?

Hello,

I'd like to set up Fiber Channel as part of my lab, and have Open-E present itself as an FC SAN to other ESXi hosts in my lab. All hosts would be interconnected with Fiber HBAs and a switch. The host with the local storage is an i7-950, and the other hosts are i5-760-based.

Is Intel VT-d required to pass the HBA directly to the Open-E VM? The i5 ESXi hosts would be connecting directly to the HBA and storage, so they would not require VT-d.

Thanks,



Chris

Quote:

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Originally Posted by chris.trotter

Hello,

I'd like to set up Fiber Channel as part of my lab, and have Open-E present itself as an FC SAN to other ESXi hosts in my lab. All hosts would be interconnected with Fiber HBAs and a switch. The host with the local storage is an i7-950, and the other hosts are i5-760-based.

Is Intel VT-d required to pass the HBA directly to the Open-E VM? The i5 ESXi hosts would be connecting directly to the HBA and storage, so they would not require VT-d.

Thanks,


Chris

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Are you talking about running DSS in a virtual machine and then using InteVT to manage hardware failover with the VM ?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Gr-R

Are you talking about running DSS in a virtual machine and then using InteVT to manage hardware failover with the VM ?

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No, sorry, what I was curious about was how VSS sees the HBA and translates itself into FC. Does the VSS VM have to see the bare card, or is it passed through ESX?

I partially cleared this up for myself, as I discovered the chipset I'll be using supports VT-d, so no longer worried about whether or not it's a requirement.

I guess I'm still curious as to how VSS presents itself as an FC SAN, but I suppose the documentation has that in there somewhere.

But to be clear, yes, I would like to run VSS inside a VM.