Accessing Meinberg PCI Devices from Within a VMware Virtual Machine

Meinberg doesn't provide specific VMware drivers for their PCI cards. This would require a native driver for VMware, and virtual device drivers for each operating system we would support inside the VMs.

However, current VMware versions provide a feature called PCI Pass Through, where a PCI slot can be assigned to a single, specific virtual machine (VM), and the device in that PCI slot is only accessible from within that particular VM. Anway, this works only if also the server hardware fully supports this. There are at least some DL380 server models from HP where the PCI chipset does not support this, so this feature isn't available on these servers. See:
https://thenetworkcable.wordpress.com/2014/11/27/psa-vmdirectpath-pci-passthrough-on-hp-dl380-g8-and-others/

If this isn't supported by the VMware installation on a specific server hardware then either the PCI Pass Through feature isn't available anyway, or an appropriate error message is displayed when the VM is started.

If this is supported and works properly then a limitation of this approach is that the PCI device is only accessible from a single, particular VM, and this VM can't be moved to a different physical machine, what normally could be done if there was no hardware dependency.

Especially with Linux running inside the VM this works pretty well with the Meinberg driver software for Linux.

Alternatively the time within VMs can be adjusted by a VMware-specific feature which just synchronizes the VM's time periodically, or by running ntpd inside the VM, which is the preferred approach at least for Linux guests running on current VMware versions.

This approach doesn't require any special VMware drivers, doesn't result in a hardware dependency on the PCI slot, and it doesn't matter on which physical machine the VM is actually being executed.

For general information on time synchronization in virtual machines see Time Synchronization In Virtual Machines.

— Martin Burnicki 2016-09-02 09:49