Dell PERC H330 RAID Controller will not function on an AMD EPYC based host if passed through to a virtual machine

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

• When VMDirectPath I/O feature is used  to pass a Dell PERC H330 RAID Controller through to a virtual machine running on a host machine with an AMD EPYC CPU, the controller will not function properly. 
• Memory within the virtual machine could be corrupted.
• The RAID controller may not function at all.

 

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 6.7
VMware vSphere ESXi 6.5

Cause

For passthrough, the H330 requires an AMD CPU feature called IOMMU exclusion ranges that ESXi currently does not support.

Other PERC RAID controller models are not affected.

Resolution

Do not use H330 storage controller in PCI Passthrough mode.
H330 storage controller functions properly when assigned to the ESXi host. For more information, see Dell KB PowerEdge: Potential data corruption on R6415, R7415, and R7425 using PERC H330 running Linux OS.