Can I flash a PCI-E device's Firmware in a VM if the VM has exclusive IOMMU access?

Posted by RibaldEddie on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by RibaldEddie
Published on 2012-09-26T02:05:01Z Indexed on 2012/09/26 3:39 UTC
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Filed under:

vmware-esx

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perc

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firmware

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pci-express

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passthrough

I have a PCI-E Dell Perc 6/i RAID card that I'd like to flash with the latest firmware. Apparently I need either a Redhat / Centos OS or Windows in order to flash the firmware, but I have a VMWare 5.0.1 ESX hypervisor installed on the box and a CentOS guest OS. My motherboard support IOMMU and I have successfully used VMWare's PCI Passthrough feature to give VMs exclusive access to a PCI-E device. Is it safe to flash the firmware of a PCI-E device if that device is passed through to a single VM using the passthrough feature of VMware? Or should I boot one of the supported OSes directly on the bare metal?

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