ESXi, 5.5, and the PERC 5 series of cards
So, many of us have come to love the stodgy old PERC5 RAID controller – this SATA 3G/s and SAS 1.5G/s controller is generally a reliable little beast.
Until it meets Intel’s VT-d on a system running esxi 5.5. Then.. not so much.
Now, if you don’t happen to need passthrough, you can disable VT-d. However, if you happen to have a Dell 710 that has no ability to disable VT-d without disabling VT-x, you might find yourself needing the ‘noiommu’ boot option.
Problem: that option no longer lurks under the advanced setting menu.
However, the good news is, you can still set it, either by passing it in on the kernel boot options line, or by setting it in the CLI:
esxcfg-advcfg –set-kernel “TRUE” noiommu