6.5.1

Table Of Contents
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Verify that the PCI devices are connected to the host and marked as available for passthrough.
Disable the USB controller for passthrough if your ESXi host is configured to boot from a USB device,
or if the active coredump partition is configured to be on a USB device or SD cards connected
through USB channels. VMware does not support USB controller passthrough for ESXi hosts that
boot from USB devices or SD cards connected through USB channels or if the active coredump
partition is configured to be on a USB device or SD card connected through USB channels. For more
information, see http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1021345.
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Verify that the virtual machine is compatible with ESXi 4.x and later.
Procedure
1 Right-click a virtual machine in the inventory and select Edit Settings.
2 On the Virtual Hardware tab, select PCI Device from the New Device drop-down menu, and click
Add.
3 Expand New PCI device and select the passthrough device to connect to the virtual machine from
the drop-down list and click Next.
4 Click OK.
Configuring 3D Graphics
When you create or edit a virtual machine, you can configure 3D graphics to take advantage of Windows
AERO, CAD, Google Earth, and other 3D design, modeling, and multimedia applications. Before you
enable 3D graphics, become familiar with the available options and requirements.
You can enable 3D on virtual machines that have Windows desktop or Linux guest operating systems.
Not all guests support 3D graphics. To verify 3D support for a guest operating system, see the VMware
Compatibility Guide at http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility.
Prerequisites
VMware supports AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards. See the vendor website for supported cards. To use
the graphics card or GPU hardware, download the appropriate VMware graphics driver from the vendor
website.
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Go to the NVIDIA website for information about the VMware graphics driver for your NVIDIA graphics
card.
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Go to the AMD website for information about the VMware graphics driver for your AMD graphics card.
Linux distributions must have a 3.2 or later kernel. If 3D is not available on a Linux guest, verify that the
driver is available in the Linux kernel. If it is not available, upgrade to a more recent Linux distribution. The
location of the kernel depends on whether the distribution is based on deb or rpm.
vSphere Virtual Machine Administration
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