Pass-through of onboard SATA to a FreeNAS VM?

[Beer]

I'm in the final stages of my home build and I'm going for virtualized setup with ESXi. There's still one thing I'm a little unclear about

The board I chose (ASRock Rack EPC612D4U) has 8x onboard SATA via the C612 chipset and I would like to pass this through to my FreeNAS VM instead of buying a separate HBA... jbod, no fake raid or anything

I've done some searching around and I'm not finding a lot of information, but I've read that there may be some issues doing this if the motherboard doesn't have a sata controller separate from the chipset. Does anyone know anything about this?

 

[miniwalks]

You'll have 2 options,
1) raw map all disks through to VM
2) pass-through the controller to the VM

Assuming your ESXi is booting from USB/SD, option 2 is the best best, then you can publish the storage back to ESXi from FreeNAS via NFS or iSCSI


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[Beer]

You'll have 2 options,
1) raw map all disks through to VM
2) pass-through the controller to the VM

Assuming your ESXi is booting from USB/SD, option 2 is the best best, then you can publish the storage back to ESXi from FreeNAS via NFS or iSCSI

Thanks. Yes I am booting ESXi from USB and sharing storage back over iSCSI

The problem is that I have read in a few places that, at least in some cases, you can't pass-through the onboard sata if the onboard sata controller is part of the chipset, rather than being its own independent controller. From my understanding anyway, I lack some knowledge about how that works. But then I found this post which led me to believe this might be possible:
https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/esxi-6-0-passthrough-onboard-sata.8902/#post-81448

Still not totally sure