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I can confirm that VT-d passthrough appears to be working just fine with the new ASRock Z87M Pro motherboard. I don’t have a need for it just yet but all the options appear to be available and it’s showing as enabled in the BIOS.
And my USB devices were able to passthrough without incident as well
Hi, i dont see onboard SATA controller in your passthrough list, do you have it disabled in bios?
Could be because I haven’t got any devices plugged into it.
And can you please test it? 🙂 Thanks.
Im planing to put 1 datastore on pcie sata addon card (esxi boot + storage VM will start from this) a passthrough onboard SATA to VM.
It’ll be a little while before I can test this. I only just put the server into the rack 😎 When my quad port nic arrives, I’ll try it then.
Interesting! Looking forward to read your tests. I´d like to do something similar, but with the 4770S less power usage and noise. Is there any reason to choose the ASRock Z87m Pro4 over Asus Z87m-PLUS? The Asus board seems easier to get a hold of, though a little more expensive.
I chose the ASRock as the previous models seem to have a better reputation of VT-d working over some of the other brands. And it was cheaper.
I’m great fan of Home builds with consumer parts too. I wonder if the built-in graphics can be passed through as I might have a project for a “family ESXi built” with one VM as a “gaming VM”…
It’s a shame that the Haswell based boards supports only 32Gb of RAM as I have another project with a built for “cloud-in-a-box” demo unit, and I’d love to have 64Gb RAM on it. So I’m uncertain which mobo/proc to pick…
NoGi: What are you using as your Esxi boot device? A flash drive?
Just a USB2 stick
Thanks for posting this series – I’ve built a similar spec machine, with a few extra components relating to noise dampening. Looking forward to getting it setup!
GoGi,
I ran across your site while researching putting together a Haswell-based home server. I’m interested in the benefits of virtualization, but am wondering – even though ESXi is free, vSphere to manage the VMs appears to be too expensive. Is there something I’m unaware of? Or should I just use Microsoft’s Hyper-V?
If you don’t mind my asking, how do you afford your Vmware ESXi virtualization solution?
I run ESXi which is free. I don’t use any of the other tools so cost is still nil.
Thanks again for this article – I build a near identical machine, and ESXi has worked without issue (I swapped in a Noctua CPU sink/fan, Adaptec 2405 PCIe RAID card, and a Seasonic PSU).
Can you passthrough the SATA controller using VT-d to the virtual machines?