Virtual Machines and Direct Access to Hardware

[Dave3000]

Is it possible to run an operating system, say Windows 10, in a virtual machine and have it detect the real hardware. Like for the drives, have it detect the my Samsung 980 Pro and 850 EVO drives, and also have direct access to my Data partition from the host. Sometimes I might want to run Samsung Magician in a virtual Windows 10 machine to see how my Samsung drives are doing or I might want to run the My Harmony software to configure my Harmony remote which that software which is not compatible with Linux. My preferred Virtual Machine software is Virtual Box. I run Linux Mint 21 as my main OS and dual booting with Windows 10 but I wonder if I'm just better of sticking with dual booting if I want direct access to hardware in Windows 10, especially if running Windows software that requires direct access to hardware.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Look up PCI-E Passthrough, SVIO, IOMMU.

 

[crashtech]

I know this isn't what you are asking for, but have you tried GSmartControl? It might be an adequate substitute to having to maintain a dual-boot system just to use your drive vendor's branded consumer software.

 

[Dave3000]

Look up PCI-E Passthrough, SVIO, IOMMU.

Maybe easier just to continue with dual booting than doing all that work.

 

[Dave3000]

I know this isn't what you are asking for, but have you tried GSmartControl? It might be an adequate substitute to having to maintain a dual-boot system just to use your drive vendor's branded consumer software.

I have not. I read up on the features and it does not mention support for NVMe drives. Also, if I ever had to send a drive that goes bad for warranty to the manufacture, and I'm not talking about just Samsung, and the drive shows problems with GSmartControl, would the manufacture of the drive accept the results from that app or any other 3rd party open source app if the manufacturer has their own drive checking app?

 

[crashtech]

I've never had to substantiate an RMA in that way myself. You just contact them, tell them their drive is no good, and send it to them.
I'd be curious to know what other's experiences are, but I suspect either I'm playing a bit fast and loose, or you are overthinking it.

 

[mxnerd]

Free : ESXi or Proxmox. Will cost you money: unRAID. all supports hardware passthrough.

Tons of tutorials on Youtube. Single machine will be hard though.

Usually you run ESXi, Proxmox or unRAID as a server,

You then have another machine as a workstation and remote into the server.

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Err, Linux with KVM (Virt-Manager I think) might be able to do hardware passthrough with single machine, but I'm not a Linux guy.

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But if you want to passthrough PCIE hardware (GPU or SATA controller ) to VM, you will need 2 sets of hardware, one comes with motherboard, another with PCIE cards, unless the motherboard comes with 2 sets of SATA controllers (if the motherboard has many SATA ports then usually it will have 2 sets of controllers)

 

[Fallen Kell]

The problem with ESXi is if you need more than 8 CPU cores, it won't support it with the free version. You are better off with Proxmox or XPC-NG (XenServer fork).