AVS › AVS Forum › Video Components › Home Theater Computers › Ceton Infinitv and ESXi? I'm stumped.
New Posts  All Forums:Forum Nav:

Ceton Infinitv and ESXi? I'm stumped. - Page 2

post #31 of 39
1/24/13 at 7:52am
I know this may not be the popular choice, but XEN does PCI passthrough pretty well... though it's a lot more complicated than ESXi to setup. ESXi's passthrough is pretty hit or miss depending on the CPU/mobo, and the PCI device to passthrough. Obviously, VMWare only supports certain NICs and HBAs officially, though many people have gotten VGA cards and other devices to go through. VT-d, IOMMU, or AMD-Vi is pretty new technology, and the hypervisors are really in their infancy in supporting this technology.

KVM also has support for PCI passthrough. I would check out Proxmox for a simple disto that has KVM baked in and a very nice GUI.
Reply
Reply

AVS Top Picks

post #32 of 39
1/24/13 at 10:50am
I have 2 Cetons that I passthrough on one of vm hosts in my home cluster. I had to use ESXi 5.0u1 because 5.1 gave me the dreaded PSOD like you have experienced. I have used them successfully for about 3 months now without any problems. I have used them both in a Windows VM and a Linux VM. I have attached a screenshot of my VM hosts summary screen if that helps at all. If you have any questions just let me know.

Reply
Reply
post #33 of 39
1/24/13 at 11:03am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Puwaha View Post

I know this may not be the popular choice, but XEN does PCI passthrough pretty well... though it's a lot more complicated than ESXi to setup. ESXi's passthrough is pretty hit or miss depending on the CPU/mobo, and the PCI device to passthrough. Obviously, VMWare only supports certain NICs and HBAs officially, though many people have gotten VGA cards and other devices to go through. VT-d, IOMMU, or AMD-Vi is pretty new technology, and the hypervisors are really in their infancy in supporting this technology.

KVM also has support for PCI passthrough. I would check out Proxmox for a simple disto that has KVM baked in and a very nice GUI.

I really wish there was more documentation out there for Proxmox. I haven't come across anyone who use pci pass through and talk about it with Proxmox.
Reply
Reply
post #34 of 39
1/24/13 at 11:04am
Thread Starter 
Well, the new motherboard is a Tyan S7012 dual 1366 board, with four (smile) Intel gigabit LANs built in. And it has six x8 slots. I plan to use the board with L5520 Xeons and as much RAM as I have lying around (which should be a lot). I suspect that board "should" play nice with ESXi and any passthroughs, which my DX58SO couldn't handle.
Reply
Reply
post #35 of 39
1/24/13 at 12:51pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by FantaXP7 View Post

I really wish there was more documentation out there for Proxmox. I haven't come across anyone who use pci pass through and talk about it with Proxmox.

Agreed, but there is some decent documentation out there for KVM which is one half of the Proxmox architecture. Passthrough isn't a GUI option as I recall, you have to get your hands a little dirty with the qemu/KVM commands.
Reply
Reply
post #36 of 39
3/24/13 at 6:16pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by kapone View Post

Well, the new motherboard is a Tyan S7012 dual 1366 board, with four (smile) Intel gigabit LANs built in. And it has six x8 slots. I plan to use the board with L5520 Xeons and as much RAM as I have lying around (which should be a lot). I suspect that board "should" play nice with ESXi and any passthroughs, which my DX58SO couldn't handle.

Any luck passing the Ceton?
Reply
Reply
post #37 of 39
3/25/13 at 11:24am
I see the OP mentioned that he has hwimage version 4884 - that is very old, and we have included many compatibility improvements in newer hwimages, so I would recommend that you try upgrading. Also this would obviously be considered an unsupported configuration, but that doesn't mean it won't work.
Reply
Reply
post #38 of 39
3/25/13 at 2:55pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by JTarasovic View Post

Any luck passing the Ceton?
Nope.
Quote:
Originally Posted by erickotz View Post

I see the OP mentioned that he has hwimage version 4884 - that is very old, and we have included many compatibility improvements in newer hwimages, so I would recommend that you try upgrading. Also this would obviously be considered an unsupported configuration, but that doesn't mean it won't work.
Eric - as I mentioned in my support ticket, I updated the card to the latest firmware, and finally had to throw it in the trash bin. Not because I couldn't pass through it in ESXI (I couldn't, and I suspect the early cards have issues with pass-through because of the on-board PCI bridge, which seems to be flaky with ESXi), but because the card kept locking up and freezing the server (not ESXi, Server 2008 R2).

As you replied to me, the card was certainly out of warranty, and I just couldn't muster up time to debug it any further or follow up with your support guys. No fault of your support guys though, they were quite responsive, however, they were "going by the book", and I tried to explain to them, that I do hardware/software as a business. "By the book" troubleshooting is meaningless to me, I already know the card is faulty.smile.gif

Again, nothing against your support folks.
Reply
Reply
post #39 of 39
4/8/13 at 8:35pm
The Intel X58S02 is an abomination. The board refuses to work with most modern RAID cards so I decided to repurpose the board for HTPC use.

I have a Ceton card already set up and paired on an older AMD system.

Just as with the RAID cards, the Ceton card would just not work on that X58S02. Put it in a Gigibyte UD3R and away it went.

Will not purchase another Intel board and the X58S02 is headed for the trash.

You just threw away a perfectly good Ceton card.
Reply
Reply
New Posts  All Forums:Forum Nav:
  Return Home
  Back to Forum: Home Theater Computers

AVS Top Picks

AVS › AVS Forum › Video Components › Home Theater Computers › Ceton Infinitv and ESXi? I'm stumped.