Maturity of PCI passthrough

[patpro]

Hello,

Disclaimer: this is my first post, and I have absolutely no experience with Proxmox. I'm also a senior sysadmin with very strong skills on VMware Vsphere 5/6.

At home I've built a multihead workstation based on ESXi 5.x. It allows me to run Windows, OSX, Linux, FreeBSD, etc. at the same time on a unique PC with very good performances. I'm using PCI passthrough to give Windows and OSX a dédicated GPU, a dedicated USB controller. I'm also passing-through the Realtek HD sound controller to the Windows VM. Thanks to a small "USB sharing squid", I can press a button to transfer keyboard/mouse/yubikey/etc. from Windows to OSX VM, and from the display I can choose HDMI (Windows) or Display Port (OSX) to get the display of the desired VM on screen. It works really great and I can use my Adobe CS5 and games on the Mac VM or other games on the Windows VM with native performances.
Everything is described here: patpro.net/blog/index.php/tag/virtualisation

Unfortunately, I'm stuck. I can't evolve anymore: I can't use modern OSX on ESXi 5.x, and when I'm trying ESXi 6.x I'm facing problems with the VMware pseudo VGA (removing it yields to a non-bootable VM). So I'm looking for a serious way out of VMware.

Proxmox sounds promising, but I'm afraid its PCI passthrough would be quite limited and/or complicated compared to what I've got on VMware. Of course, it allows NVidia consumers GPU (won't work with VMware at all), but I would feel reassured if I could for sure passthrough my current hardware: MSI Radeon R9 270X GAMING 2G and ATI Radeon HD 5770 Mac Edition.
Also, I would like to know if passthrough is stable on Proxmox, because the PC run's 24/7, and the average uptime for those workstation VMs is around 30 days.

Any hint appreciated.

 

[Neil Duffy]

I recently starting using Proxmox after testing ESXi first.

I needed to run a win7 server and pass through a dvb-s2 card.

For some strange reason, installing win 7 took an age, very slow and when I did have it ready, I passed through the pci-e card, which worked ok, but everytime I tried to install the actual driver, BSOD.

Tried all i knew, but go nowhere.

So gave up, installed Proxmox, win 7 install was painless and as quick as it should be, then I passed through the dvb-s2 card and all was well.

Ok, a bit of terminal is required to sort passthrough, but i prefer that to clumsy GUI's etc. an above all, it works great!

 

[dcsapak]

it really depends on the hardware, i have here an asus board and a amd r5 270 and an nvidia gtx 1030 which both passthrough without problems in win10, but the onboard usb controller is very wonky (as in, it resets itself every few seconds, making mouse/keyboard on this nearly unusable) so i used usb passthrough for this

on the other hand, we had reports that the passthrough did not work at all with some graphics cards, etc.
so i guess the best way is try it report if it worked

 

[patpro]

I must admit I'm quite concerned with my GPUs, and with the general stability of the setup under Proxmox.

I'll take advantage of next vacations to test the latest Proxmox on a spare HDD, but I'm pretty confident it will take a lot of time and research :/

 

[jdusablon]

It's not that technically difficult, however some reading beforehand will save you a lot of trouble. I can't post urls (I'm too new) but google "passthrough proxmox gtx 1060" and you should find Jim Chen's blog.