ESXi 7 PCI Passthrough Gigabyte B550 board

 

System:

Gigabyte B550 Aorus Elite Pro

Ryzen 3100

Sandisk 32GB USB sticks

Problem:

After trying to pass through an LSI 9207-8i, subsequent reboots still showed the device in " Enabled / Needs reboot" in ESXi 7.0 and the device was not assignable.

I worked through a few steps:

Disabled the LSI driver so it wouldn't grab the card

esxcli system module set --enabled=false --module=lsi_msgpt2

(can't remember if it was gpt2 or gpt3 though)

Changed system UEFI settings 

Found these on reddit, not sure if they really helped: 

Tweaker -> Advanced CPU Settings -> SVM Mode -> Enabled
Settings -> Miscellaneous -> IOMMU -> Enabled
Settings -> NBIO Common Options -> IOMMU -> Enabled
Settings -> NBIO Common Options -> ACS Enable -> Enable
Settings -> NBIO Common Options -> Enable AER Cap -> Enable

Disable ACS Checks in ESXi

Manage > System > Advanced settings
Set VMkernel.Boot.disableACSCheck to True.

 

 

 Reboot. Done.