TechnSide2 Posted October 3, 2017 Share Posted October 3, 2017 (edited) I'm new to the Forums. But I wanted to share with everyone my experience with ESXi and unRaid. my goal was to build a NAS for the home computers and also a virtual gaming machine. My rig: CPU: intel i7 7700K MB: Asus H270 Plus Prime GPU : nvidia evga GTX 960 RAM: 16 GB's I verified all settings were enabled in BIOS for vT-d and Hyper threading. 1st setup was unRaid and a windows 10 with GPU passthrough. It worked really well and was very easy to setup. But I was hung up on the purchase price of unraid. So I decided to explore other options. I use to use nas4free but got tired of the upgrade process. It did not have GPU passthrough like I wanted. At least I didn't try it, from what I was reading is that virtualbox doesn't support it. So I was like we use ESX and vSphere at work, plus I'd been wanting to learn VMware anyway. I found the awesome website that allowed you to create custom ESXi installation ISO's but ultimately the only version I could get working was 5.5. From what I was reading on the internet is that GPU passthrough is very difficult to accomplish with ESXi and Nvidia cards. Boy where they right. I never ended up getting the GTX 960 working correctly. Always ended up with error stop code 43 in device manager. Apparently nvidia drivers can detect if an OS is virtualized. I tried all the flags the other sites recommended but never got it working. I ultimately gave up on ESXi and reloaded the unraid and re-setup the windows VM again and man I can't tell you how incredibly simple this was. I will be purchasing unRaid Plus very soon. Edited October 3, 2017 by TechnSide2 1 Quote Link to comment
tdallen Posted October 3, 2017 Share Posted October 3, 2017 Hello and welcome. It's great to hear your experience. I feel like it's worth paying for software that enables me to do something I can't easily do with free software, or saves me time by thoughtfully packaging the functionality I need and making it easy to use. Life is busy and my time is worth something ;). Quote Link to comment
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