Ran out of PCIe Ports, X399, pci passthrough

Hardware Motherboards
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Hello all
My aim is to not be using the host PC directly for things but to do my browsing and gaming in VMs.
To that end I’m running a windows VM with the plan to add a Linux VM with CPI pass through to my current ~10 other VMs. Virtualization my windows PC is faster than my old 2x x5690xeons.

I’ve the current card types installed in a gigabyte x399 designare ex:
VM1 GPU
VM1 USB
Host GPU set a primary GPU in BIOS
VM2 GPU
Host storage HBA,

I’m trying to pass through a second USB card using a DELOCK 62788 which converts an NVMe slot via a SFF-8643 connector and cable.
However when the card is present in the 62788 there is no display output. My fans behave normal IE stop; pump only at idle.
I was not smart enough to think of looking at the diagnostic LED but I did find that my VMs which auto start had unclean shutdowns logged after I held in the power switch…

I have one idea as a way of not browsing the web on the host which is to use firefox over SSH from a-n-other VM but I’m not sure if that is as safe and secure as I hope. It does play back you tube though which is a plus.

So I’m after ideas? Could I try and split up the first of the 8x slots in to two 4 slots? and get two different IOMMU?

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Do you really need all those VMs on the 1 box with their own gpus? Why not just build another box if you have that much need. You could also consider a gpu that allows multiple hosts to share it.

1 Like
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Did you run out of PCIe lanes or something? Maybe the NVMe slot converter is broken? Other then that I’m not really sure, sorry, good luck though. :frowning:

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Need? Nope. Its only two VMs with GPUs One shall be Linux and one is Windows.

I live in a hyper converged world so why not.
I’ve a few test VMs my Mail and Name server, a security onion, my terminal server I do Tax and accounting on, file servers, SQL servers and some DNS revolvers that run DNS sink holes.
I don’t want to do something on my host that breaks these.

Cost for the performance is one reason not to get a pro GPU to share.

I’ve used all of the slots for actual cards, although one only uses 4 of an 8 and I have three NVMe slots free, I want to use 2 of these for storage though.

I guess I could have a fault somewhere hardware wise but I kind of expect that the Bios is just freaked out by what was connected.

Thanks

I found on these forums that the 8x slots don’t but the 16x slots do support bifurcation Gigabyte x399 pci-e bifurcation support?

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Hi @JEF_UK … do you have the details on your setup posted anywhere? I’m trying to get two GPU passed-through with same motherboard as you, but the 2nd gpu escapes my grasp. What bios version are you on, what distro did you use, etc? Thanks!