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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?

RibaldEddie
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    If that RAID card is in use by the host you could have some... Undesirable effects on the host when you disconnect it (speaking from experience here, I still have an orphaned VM that I can't shut down because of unexpected removal of storage) – Mark Henderson Sep 26 '12 at 02:09

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The answer is yes. You can do it.

RibaldEddie
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Yep. Doable... I needed to do it with an LSI 9211-8i controller enabled through passthrough.

Community
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ewwhite
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