Poweredge R730XD, ESXI, FREENAS VM, H730 mini, booting issue

[Dave Hob]

Hi

I am trying to run FreeNAS virtualized under R730XD with the H730 mini controller card that has passthrough.

ESXI is installed on USB. H730 mini is passthrough (HBA mode).

FreeNAS is installed on PCI-E NVME M2 Samsung pro 970 card

I am able to make FreeNAS boot under the following circumstances:
- bare metal install and boot from USB
- FreeNAS virtualized without the H730 attached to it
- FreeNAS virtualized with the H730 attached to it but just on VCPU provided

I also booted in FREENAS with one VCPU and did the following to make sure the mrsas driver are being used:

To ensure the mrsas driver is being used edit /boot/device.hints, add the following line and reboot
Code:
hw.mfi.mrsas_enable="1"

Can't make it boot yet virtualized with more than 1 VCPU and the H730 attached to it.

Though I came across other "similar" posts I was not able to fix this by the approaches suggested there:

• Flipping the setting of X2APIC
• Flipping the setting for HyperThreading

Attaching a bunch of screen shots from bios settings, boot, esxi

Any feedback is highly appreciated. Not the smoothest journey so far but learned a lot and that was the goal to start with.