Virtual Machine has Passthrough devices fails to power on with "Module 'DevicePowerOn' power on failed." Message

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

This article provides steps to troubleshoot VM with passthrough devices power on failure issue.

Symptoms:

• Unable to power on a Virtual machine that has Passthrough devices attached.
• Below messages can be found in the vmware.log file under Virtual machine home directory:

    2019-03-21T05:54:27.689Z| vmx| I125: PCIPassthru: Failed to register device 0000:58:00.0  error = 0x13
    2019-03-21T05:54:27.689Z| vmx| I125: Msg_Post: Error
    2019-03-21T05:54:27.689Z| vmx| I125: [msg.pciPassthru.createAdapterFailedDeviceNotFound] Device 088:00.0 was not found.
    2019-03-21T05:54:27.689Z| vmx| I125: ----------------------------------------
    2019-03-21T05:54:27.690Z| vmx| I125: Module 'DevicePowerOn' power on failed.
    2019-03-21T05:54:27.690Z| vmx| I125: VMX_PowerOn: ModuleTable_PowerOn = 0
    .........................................................................
    2019-03-21T05:54:27.747Z| vmx| I125+ Power on failure messages: Module 'DevicePowerOn' power on failed.
    2019-03-21T05:54:27.747Z| vmx| I125+ Device 088:00.0 was not found.
    2019-03-21T05:54:27.747Z| vmx| I125+ Failed to start the virtual machine.

Note: The preceding log excerpts are only examples. Date, time, and environmental variables may vary depending on your environment.

• Virtual machine with same configurations powers on on other ESXi without any problem.

Cause

VM is configured to pass through a host PCI device,but VMDirectPath I/O mode is disabled on ESXi host. This issue occurs when PCI device Passthrough was disabled or removed during hardware side reconfiguration.

Resolution

To solve the issue, refer to the instructions given in the article Configuring VMDirectPath I/O pass-through devices on a VMware ESX or VMware ESXi host, to enable VMDirectPath I/O pass-through devices on ESXi.