PCI Passthrough of a HSM

[celingt8]

Hi everyone,

I'm really new and Promox and I decided to directly start with in in my opinion advanced topic.

We currently operate a small Proxmox cluster where we want to run some VMs and LXCs. Some of those should be able to use the PCIe HSM of the host. After reading the wiki I understand, that when I pass through the device, I can not use it from the host anymore and in general LXCs are not supported. But the question is, can I assign the HSM device to multiple VMs? And if not, is it a suitable solution to "assign" the HSM device to a VM where I operate docker and where than the docker containers can use the HSM device? And in all this scenarios, is it a good idea to use it in production?

In general it would be also interesting if someone out there already passed through a HSM and can share his or her experience.

Thanks

 

[aaron]

Cannot really help with experience regarding HSMs specifially. But a PCI device can only be passed through to a single VM. Now if the PCI device supports virtual functions, it is possible that those are in their own IOMMU group which could make it feasible to pass them through to different VMs.