Processor - AMD FX-6100
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103962
Motherboard - ASRock 960GM/U3S3 FX [Micro-ATX]
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157323
I'm planning to use this combination for my ESXi whitebox. This mobo is using chipset 7 series which does not has AMD-VI. Souce: http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/VTd_HowTo
From the source, it even say
Even when the chipset supports IOMMU, the bios must have a ACPI IVRS table to enable the use of it! So actual support depends on the motherboard manufacturer. At the time of writing all motherboards seem to have a (beta)bios available supporting the IOMMU.
So even I'm buying mobo with chipset 890FX or 9xx series, the mobo BIOS might not support it. So I might not able to use it even buying the more expensive mobo.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_virtualization
An input/output memory management unit (IOMMU) enables guest virtual machines to directly use peripheral devices, such as Ethernet, accelerated graphics cards, and hard-drive controllers, through DMA and interrupt remapping. This is sometimes called PCI passthrough
Do I need to use IOMMU in VCP5 lab session? as I'm using the ESXi to simulate the lab testing for VCP5, I have not think of anything to use for my whitebox later on.
In simple words, without IOMMU the VMs cannot access to the devices in host machine? the VM can only access to those hardware devices in that computer that we use to access the VM?
