Hard-drive passthrough

[DragonWing88]

Hey everyone
I'm trying to get the smart testing working for my hard drives on my truenas vm after some research I found out I had to pass through the controllers for the hard drives to make it work the only walk through i have been able to find are pass-through with a pcie card. I was wondering if there was a way to passthrough off the sata ports on my mother board? Sorry if in not making since I'm new to this and trying to figure it out as I go. Thanks for any help

 

[mas-ts]

I have tryed https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Passthrough_Physical_Disk_to_Virtual_Machine_(VM) but it do not provide SMART data.

Some have it as a separate controller, that you can then do pass-through of.


Eg port 1-4 is one controller and 5+6 is another

if you look at the older ASUS X99-DELUXE (https://techgage.com/article/asus-x99-deluxe-motherboard-review/) some sata ports is marked as "Intel" and some is "ASMedia" so not all 12 ports use the same controller and it is then an option to split that, but not on a port level, so if the MB only have one sata controller and you use the sata ports for other VM's or the host OS then you will need another controller that you can pass through.

 

[DragonWing88]

I have tryed https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Passthrough_Physical_Disk_to_Virtual_Machine_(VM) but it do not provide SMART data.

Some have it as a separate controller, that you can then do pass-through of.
View attachment 80138

Eg port 1-4 is one controller and 5+6 is another

if you look at the older ASUS X99-DELUXE (https://techgage.com/article/asus-x99-deluxe-motherboard-review/) some sata ports is marked as "Intel" and some is "ASMedia" so not all 12 ports use the same controller and it is then an option to split that, but not on a port level, so if the MB only have one sata controller and you use the sata ports for other VM's or the host OS then you will need another controller that you can pass through.

So would it just be easier to get a pcie controller?

 

[leesteken]

So would it just be easier to get a pcie controller?

PCI(e) passthrough comes with all kinds of possible issues: not resetting properly (via FLR or bus), not working with passthrough at all, driver issues inside the VM, problematic IOMMU groups... Lots of threads about that on this forum. Yes, when it works, you get all the benefits of the device(s) inside the VM, but there are no guarantees beforehand and I would not call it easy at all. (Also, no ballooning possible in VMs with PCI(e) passthrough.)

 

[louie1961]

I recently built a new Proxmox machine and also virtualized TrueNAS (scale). I decided to use one of these m.2 to SATA adapters (https://www.newegg.com/p/17Z-0061-000D5?Item=9SIARE9K9G2395). It passes through to TrueNAS with no issue, and TrueNAS can do everything (smart tests, spin down drives, etc). I used the motherboard SATA ports for my Proxmox drives and the M.2 adapter ports for TrueNAS. Works great. I also found out that my motherboard SATA chipset is based on a 2 port ASmedia chip with a multiplexer. So I am hoping that the AS1166 chip with get better through put for TrueNAS

If you don't have an M.2 slot to spare, they make PCIe version of the same AS1166 chipset.

 

[louie1961]

(Also, no ballooning possible in VMs with PCI(e) passthrough.)

In my opinion, at least in the case of virtualizing TrueNAS, no ballooning is actually a good thing.

 

[DragonWing88]

I recently built a new Proxmox machine and also virtualized TrueNAS (scale). I decided to use one of these m.2 to SATA adapters (https://www.newegg.com/p/17Z-0061-000D5?Item=9SIARE9K9G2395). It passes through to TrueNAS with no issue, and TrueNAS can do everything (smart tests, spin down drives, etc). I used the motherboard SATA ports for my Proxmox drives and the M.2 adapter ports for TrueNAS. Works great. I also found out that my motherboard SATA chipset is based on a 2 port ASmedia chip with a multiplexer. So I am hoping that the AS1166 chip with get better through put for TrueNAS

If you don't have an M.2 slot to spare, they make PCIe version of the same AS1166 chipset.

Did you have to do any specific configs or was it plug and play?

 

[louie1961]

Pretty simple really. I had to do the usual steps to enable IOMMU:
1. I edited /etc/kernel/cmdline to add "amd_iommu=on"
2. Ran the command "proxmox-boot-tool refresh"
3. Edited /etc/modules to add: vfio, vfio_iommu_type1, and vfio_pci
4. Ran the command "update-initramfs -u -k all"
5. Rebooted the machine.

Instructions are here: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/PCI(e)_Passthrough

When I rebooted the machine I went into the TrueNAS VM hardware configuration tab (VM not running) and selected the add PCIe device option. From the drop down I selected the AS1166 device and added it to the VM as a raw device (not mapped)

Pretty easy really. Jeff from Craft Computing has a nice tutorial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hOBAGKLQkI