How do you passthrough native SATA drives to a guest on ESXi?

Posted by John on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by John
Published on 2010-05-25T11:11:01Z Indexed on 2012/12/13 11:07 UTC
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I have ESXi 4.0 running on an Intel DX58S0 Mothboardboard with an Intel Core i7 930 processor. VT-d is also enabled.

I have three drives in the system, drive 0 is used for ESXi. Drive 1 and 2 contain data from an older machine and show up under the "Storage Adapters" section in configuration.

I would like to allow a guest machine to access the data on these drives (as nativly as possible). I have enabled passthrough of the motherboard's built in SATA controller (Intel/Marvell 88SE6121 ). This controller shows up in my guest OS, but the guest shows no drives aside from the normal virtual drive. I have tried a Linux guest and Windows7. I have also configured the host machine to try IDE/RAID/ACHI modes for the SATA controller.

Any ideas how I can configure one of my guests to get at the raw data on these drives?

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