Vmware passthrough nvidia gt 710

One of my customers needed a way to use 4 monitors on his vmware server.

There where 2 Geforce GT710’s available. We don’t need high end 3D stuff.

To get this working i had to put the 2 cards in passthrough mode.

To do this go to Host -> Manage -> Hardware, check both cards and click on Toggle passthrough.

Now the cards will show up when you edit the VM.

Shut down the vm, if it’s running, and go to edit settings, click on add other device, and choose the pci devices where you enabled the passthrough.

On the gt 710 devices you need to put some extra options, otherwise the passthrough doesn’t seem to work.

In the settings menu go to VM Options -> Advanced -> Configuration Parameters: Edit Configuration

Add these parameters:

hypervisor.cpuid.v0 = FALSE
pciPassthru.use64bitMMIO=”TRUE”
pciPassthru.64bitMMIOSizeGB = “64”

I found this on the internet about the pciPassthru.64bitMMIOSizeGBs setting.

Specifying the 2nd entry requires a simple calculation. Count the number of high-end PCI devices(*) you intend to pass into the VM, multiply that number by 16 and then round up to the next power of two. For example, to use passthrough with two devices, the value would be: 2 * 16 = 32, rounded up to the next power of two to yield 64. For a single device, use 32. Use this value in the 2nd entry:

Posted by Bram

Owner of x-plose. www.X-plose.be. Having fun with chef, icinga, networking