Hello everyone so I have this idea and I want to know if maybe it would work. So this HighPoint SSD7101A-1 seems to use a PLX chip to give each of the 4 NVME drives X4 lanes, so if I bought this card could I passthrough all 4 NVME drives in the HighPoint to separate VM’s via IOMMU? Do they support [Reset]?
– HighPoint SSD7101A-1 @X16
–PLX
–NVME#1 @X4
–NVME#2 @X4
–NVME#3 @X4
–NVME#4 @X4
I’m trying to find a way to have 4 NVME drives for separate VM’s without using more than 1 PCIE X16 slot.
No experience with that kit but the answer is probably no at least not on the bare metal side.
Here is why I think so.
The pass through would happen with the controller on the PCIe card. Unless the controller worked as a transparent “hub” or a PCIE breakout adaptor and presented the SSDs as “branched devices” of the PCIe port on the other side, what you would get is PCIe device (IOMMU group) that presented the SSDs as “dev/sd*”. You can still pass through devices in the /dev directory as everything is file in the *nix world. I have done this. The caveat is that you may incur some overhead because you will not be dealing with bare metal. It all depends on the application of each VM as well.