Vmware ESX4 and ISA-passthrough

[Daniel Meszaros]

Hi there,

I recently spoke to a friend who claimed that Vmware ESX/ESXi would be
able to pass-through direct access between a guest OS and an ISA card
connected to the host.

It would be nice if this was possible as we have several old ISA cards
here that have no further support on newer systems than NT4 or 9x. We
could then proceed using them.

Can anyone confirm that this works?

CU,
Daniel.

[Scott Lowe]

vSphere 4.0 does support the passthrough of certain types of PCIe
devices. It does not, to my knowledge, support the passthrough of ISA
devices. Nor, for that matter, can I think of a hardware platform that
both meets the requirements of vSphere 4.0 (64-bit CPU, virtualization
extensions, etc.) and also supports ISA cards. Those are almost
mutually exclusive.

--
Scott Lowe
Author, "Mastering VMware vSphere 4" and "VMware vSphere 4
Administration Instant Reference"
http://blog.scottlowe.org

[Daniel Meszaros]

Hi!

Am 30.03.2010 06:13, schrieb Scott Lowe:
> On 2010-03-26 06:56:16 -0400, Daniel Meszaros said:
>
>> I recently spoke to a friend who claimed that Vmware ESX/ESXi would be
>> able to pass-through direct access between a guest OS and an ISA card
>> connected to the host.

>> [...]

>> Can anyone confirm that this works?
>
> vSphere 4.0 does support the passthrough of certain types of PCIe
> devices. It does not, to my knowledge, support the passthrough of ISA
> devices.

Thx for the bad news. :-)

> Nor, for that matter, can I think of a hardware platform that
> both meets the requirements of vSphere 4.0 (64-bit CPU, virtualization
> extensions, etc.) and also supports ISA cards. Those are almost mutually
> exclusive.

There are several industry mainboards (no mainstream stuff) that still
hold ISA ports and that do support at least Core 2 Duo CPUs. But it
makes no sense buying them if I cannot access the hardware.

Thanks anyway.

CU,
Mészi.