NVidia GT 710 & ESXI 6.5+

[jammerxd]

Hello everyone! I'm trying to get NVidia's GT710 graphics card working in esxi 6.7 on a Dell PowerEdge R710 machine. The Dell PowerEdge R710 has 4 PCIE x8 slots available for extensions. I currently have 1 quad ethernet NIC card in 1 of those 4 slots and the other 3 each have a NVidia GT 710 2GB PNY graphics card installed. I did manage to get the pass-through enabled on the host machine and get the virtual machine to install the NVidia drivers and there is no code 43 or BSOD with error 116. The issue that is occurring is that I cannot seem to get the HDMI or VGA ports to show any kind of signal output. The DVI port works and shows a signal, but the HDMI and VGA are blank and the virtual machine doesn't even detect that there's a monitor plugged in. Am I doing something wrong or is this something NVidia intentionally did to prevent end users like myself on low budgets from being able to experiment with virtualization and pass-through?

All I want is a virtual machine system that allows any OS with GPU-passthrough so I can run my code editors and have 2-3 "dev" machines that can be used for developing and testing code before doing a git commit/push or installing the server programs on my main rig.

 

Thanks to anyone who can help!

[Electronics Wizardy]

36 minutes ago, jammerxd said:

All I want is a virtual machine system that allows any OS with GPU-passthrough so I can run my code editors and have 2-3 "dev" machines that can be used for developing and testing code before doing a git commit/push or installing the server programs on my main rig.

Why do you need gpu passthough for that? Just use the virtual gpu in esxi.

[jammerxd]

The virtual gpu doesn't allow my code editors to run smoothly and is capped at 256MB of RAM(that's system ram not gpu ram).

[Electronics Wizardy]

Just now, jammerxd said:

The virtual gpu doesn't allow my code editors to run smoothly and is capped at 256MB of RAM(that's system ram not gpu ram).

Do you need esxi? Id put windows server on it and use hyper-v. It lets you make a high performance virtual gpu so you don't need passthough.

[NelizMastr]

Nvidia doesn't allow Geforce cards to be passed through anymore. It doesn't work and it won't work. Get an AMD card. Radeons and FirePros are fine.

[jammerxd]

Actually this card is working perfectly in pass-through mode apart from the HDMI and VGA ports. The claim that they are unsupported is widely made, yet people like myself are still able to make it work fine because there are configuration flags you can set to make it work. If you have a $55 AMD card that works just as well AND comes in under the 25w power limit, please let me know as that is the budget. 

 

Also yes ESXI is required as it is the most flexible with datastores, OS guests, and ways to connect via network.