SOLVED Truenas scale ESXI HBA passthrough question

[Kilokk]

So I am currently working on installing Truenas Scale on my home server under an ESXI hypervisor installed on an NVME drive. The issue I'm running into is the all or nothing PCI-e passthrough. I want to do a ZFS raid for my 5 4TB drives, but I have existing VMs on a separate SATA SSD (domain controller and a few others) that are vital to my homelab setup. My hardware is fully capable of doing passthrough but if I do that I can no longer access the VMs that are on the SSD will be inaccessable. I'm running this all on an Asus ESC4000 g3 so I can't just bypass the HBA card for the SSD, as there's no other way to power the drive.

Basically my question is, is there any way around this? Some way to maybe access the datastores if they're mounted on a separate drive on Truenas? I'm leery about doing a hardware raid, but if my options are that or not having those VMs I don't really have a choice.

Sorry if this has been answered but I feel like my problem is SUPER specific, and google has failed me thus far.

 

[Samuel Tai]

Are you using any of the expansion slots for GPUs? If not, you may want to get a PCIe to SATA adapter, like this:

OWC Accelsior S Storage Expansion With a Speed Boost

Accelsior S is the simple solution to add a high speed SATA 6G drive to silver Mac Pro towers otherwise restricted to 3G architecture.

eshop.macsales.com

Then, you can just rehost the critical SSD onto this adapter, and off the backplane connected to the HBA. You'll have to redo your VMs to point to the new drive attachments, but I don't see why this couldn't solve your issue.

 

[Kilokk]

Are you using any of the expansion slots for GPUs? If not, you may want to get a PCIe to SATA adapter, like this:

OWC Accelsior S Storage Expansion With a Speed Boost

Accelsior S is the simple solution to add a high speed SATA 6G drive to silver Mac Pro towers otherwise restricted to 3G architecture.

eshop.macsales.com

Then, you can just rehost the critical SSD onto this adapter, and off the backplane connected to the HBA. You'll have to redo your VMs to point to the new drive attachments, but I don't see why this couldn't solve your issue.

That's perfect! Thank you!