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GPU Passthrough with Nested ESXi

05.09.2023 by William Lam // 8 Comments

Advancements in ESXi Nested Virtualization have given us the ability to run ESXi inside of a VM (Nested ESXi) and has allowed us to do just about anything you would with a physical ESXi host for development, testing and learning purposes. In fact, I have shared many tips and tricks for using Nested ESXi and Nested Virtualization over the years on my blog, which is worth bookmarking in case you are trying to do something and run into an issue which more than likely, I have come across.

Today, there is very little you can not do using Nested ESXi and is typically limited toΒ a physical device that can not be virtualized and/or emulated in software.

I bring this up because I recently had a chat with Frank Denneman on an unrelated topic and he brought up the question about being able to double passthrough of a GPU from a physical ESXi host into a Nested ESXi VM which would then be passthrough'ed again to a VM running on that Nested ESXi system. While this was not the first time that I had heard of such a request, it does not come up often, this has only been the second time I have heard of this request. For context, his use case was for testing purposes and I can certainly see some interesting scenarios where you want to run vSphere in a Nested environment and still access all the vSphere capabilities including leveraging a physical GPU within that environment, whether that is AI/ML or other graphics process requirements.

My response to Frank was this will not work for a few reasons, one of which is that the use of Virtual Hardware-Assisted Virtualization (VHV) is not supported with DirectPath I/O and if the GPU is passthrough to a VM, even if it was running ESXi, it would be in control of the GPU, so how could one passthrough it again?

My curiosity got the better of me and given this was the second time I had ever been asked about this, I figured maybe it was worth exploring but before I go down anymore πŸ‡πŸ•³οΈ, I wanted to get quick sanity check from one of our graphics engineers on the remote feasibility of this ask.

[Read more...]

Categories // vSphere 7.0 Tags // Dragon Canyon, GPU, Intel NUC, Serpent Canyon

ESXi with Intel Arc 750 / 770 GPU

01.24.2023 by William Lam // 11 Comments

I have to say, the @IntelGraphics team does a very nice job on their packaging!

Look forward to kicking the tires on their new Arc GPUs, luckily this fits nicely in the Intel 12 Extreme NUC (Dragon Canyon) 😁 pic.twitter.com/DHTC93pzmc

— William Lam (@*protected email*) (@lamw) January 21, 2023

I recently had the opportunity to play with one of Intel's Arc 7 series discrete GPU (A750), which is part of the new Intel Arc desktop graphics product line, that was just released last Fall. While the primary audience for the Intel Arc graphics is for creators and desktop gaming, I was really interested in its applicability for a vSphere-based environment which also has a number of interesting use cases for graphics from Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), video transcoding/rendering, AI/ML, Kubernetes, general purpose graphics acceleration and even basic gaming to name a few.

While there are many GPU options in the market for vSphere, depending on your needs and budget, the new Intel's new Arc 7 series could be a nice modern option as it is touted to be both price and performance competitive with other offerings within the market.

[Read more...]

Categories // ESXi, vSphere 7.0, vSphere 8.0 Tags // ESXi 7.0, ESXi 8.0, GPU, Intel Arc

Updated findings for passthrough of Intel NUC Integrated Graphics (iGPU) with ESXi

11.17.2022 by William Lam // 43 Comments

While searching for drivers for another Intel NUC platform, I saw that Intel had recently published new graphic drivers for Linux including support for their new Intel Arc GPUs. This of course got me curious on wondering whether this would help at all with the issues regarding passthrough of the integrated graphics (iGPU) for recent Intel NUCs? πŸ€”

As a refresher, starting with the 11th Gen Intel NUCs, passthrough of the iGPU on Windows had stopped working and would result in the infamous Windows Error Code 43 and even worse on the 12th Gen Intel NUCs, Windows would simply BSOD after the initial reboot. The behavior is also simliar for Linux operating systems, while it better handles the issue by not crashing the OS, iGPU passthrough is also not functional for Linux systems.

To be honest, I had low expectations these new Linux graphic drivers would behave any differently, but I decided for the sake of persistency that I would give it one more go. I had access to both an Intel NUC 12 Extreme (Dragon Canyon) and Intel NUC 12 Pro (Wall Street Canyon), both of which included recent Intel iGPUs.

🀯🀯🀯 is the only way I could describe what I had discovered after my testing!

[Read more...]

Categories // ESXi, Home Lab, vSphere 7.0, vSphere 8.0 Tags // Dragon Canyon, ESXi 7.0 Update 3, ESXi 8.0, GPU, Intel Arc, Iris Xe, Wall Street Canyon

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Author

William Lam is a Senior Staff Solution Architect working in the VMware Cloud team within the Cloud Infrastructure Business Group (CIBG) at VMware. He focuses on Cloud Native, Automation, Integration and Operation for the VMware Cloud based Software Defined Datacenters (SDDC) across Private, Hybrid and Public Cloud

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