VMware ESXi & Mac Pro GPU Question

[timbloom]

I've been recently teaching myself the capabilities of ESXi on Mac hardware now that lion is supported in order to evaluate the possibilities for my client base.
In the process, I've been testing its limits. I currently have it set up with a Lion Server guest VM, along with a couple of others. As a test of its limits, I've set the Radeon 5870 to pass through to the guest lion system. To my surprise, it's functioning well, as I suspected to to completely bomb initially.

My issue is that, while I appear to have quartz extreme functioning and benchmarking at about 80% of native OS X, OpenGL is benchmarking as significantly crippled. While researching, I found that OS X is listing the GPU generically as a Radeon 5000 with the proper amount of VRAM, so I'm suspecting that it may be driver-related.

I know it's a stretch, but does anyone have any insight on possible solutions to this? I'm not under the impression that I'm magically going to have some virtualized gaming rig, but I would be excited to make any progress to have OpenGL performance improved.

 

[rwwest7]

OS X is legally allowed to be virtualized under ESXi? That would be awesome if it's true. I thought you could only make a Mac VM under Fusion?

If you are "benchmarking" a VM and testing out its graphics power you are in it for all the wrong reasons. People don't run VMs to play games or watch movies. They run VMs to be servers and floating desktops. Unless your clients are 18 year old gamers you shouldn't even worry about what the display drivers is labeled.

If gaming is your intent than Parallels would be better for you, it performs much better with stuff like that.

 

[goMac]

I don't believe VMWare supports OpenGL acceleration under OS X clients.

 

[MacBand]

OpenGL with Mac on ESXi5

I'm not an OpenGL or graphics expert, but I am trying to understand why OpenGL would work (though poorly) from ESXi with a Linux VM client, but not with MacOS. While on a Mac glxgears will spin gears on a physical machine but not on a VM. While with Linux (SuSE or Redhat) glxgears works both on physical and virtual machine. It's only a Mac image on VMware ESXi that has this problem... what needs to be done to correct it? Or is that a capability that VMware is not providing?

 

[crazzyeddie]

Needs driver support from VMware.