Hello!
I'm trying to "passthrough" a USB 3.0 Host Conroller PCIe Card with the NEC/Renesas µPD720201 4-Port Chip to a Windows Server 2003 guest with ESXi 5.0 update 2:
- The USB controller card shows as "Unknown USB Device" in the ESXi Passthrough configuration, but it can be selected and activated for passthrough
- The card will be recogniced from Windows 2003 Guest and the driver, version 30230, can be successfully installed, but the device does not work - a yellow exclamation mark with an error similar to "the device could not be started (code 10)" is shown in the device manager.
- A fresh installed Windows XP SP3 guest for testing will show the same behavior as the Windows 2003 guest.
- The card works fine unter a native Windows 2003 on the same hardware (for testing purposes, I have the old Windows 2003 installation, prior to the ESXi migration, on a small partition).
I found some posts, that the older controller chip, the NEC µPD720200, will work fine with passthrough (as other USB 3.0 controllers also) - but I was unable to find anything about the newer ones, the µPD720201 or µPD720202.
I also tried to get this running with the (current) ESXi 5.1, but this also failed with another, an essential, problem: the ESXi 5.1 seems to ignore a configured passthrough USB controller - the device will be unlisted after reboot. I found many posts in this forum about this issue and a post about an answer from a VMware technical support person, that this will not be supported anymore with ESXi 5.1.
So, I reverted back to ESXi 5.0u2, where this should basically work, but not in my case.
-> Does anyone have passthrough experience with the newer NEC/Renesas USB 3.0 Controllers and how to get this working?
Thanks.