[Tutorial - Modifying 1.04b Loader to Default to 24 Drives]

8 hours ago, autohintbot said:

 

You'll only need to do the procedure every time you update the bootloader (which is a pretty rare event).

 

It does look like there is a 16-device limit per VM with passthrough.  This is only passing through a single device, though:  The LSI controller.  ESXi isn't managing the individual hard drives, and has no knowledge they even exist once the LSI card is passthrough-enabled.  You would need some pretty esoteric hardware to even have 16 PCIe devices available for passthrough.

Thanks for the (quick) reply! I know that a single LSI 9211-8i board is capable of connecting 24 HDDs (and more)... I was wondering why a seller[1] would sell a similar setup with 3 of them. What are the scenarios that it would cover that a single wouldn't? That setup probably includes a backplane BPN-SAS-846A[2], that as far as I know, has 6 ipass connections to the HBA card, right? 

 

[1] https://www.theserverstore.com/SuperMicro-848A-R1K62B-w-X9QRi-F-24x-LFF-Server

[2] https://www.supermicro.com/manuals/other/BPN-SAS-846A.pdf

[Tutorial - Modifying 1.04b Loader to Default to 24 Drives]

Great tutorial, I am about to buy a 24 bays Supermicro and I am planning how to install DSM on the new hardware. Probably I will use ESXi 6.7 and create a vm for Xpenology. I most likely will use LSI 9211-8i like you, but I guess I read somewhere that ESXi passthrough has a 16 devices limit, which got me by surprised. Looking your description, it seems you managed to passthrough all 24 disks, right?

 

Regarding your tutorial, should I do the same procedure every time that I upgrade DSM or just when I upgrade the boot loader?