making a PCI soundcard work inside a Parallels Desktop virtual machine

Question

im running Windows 8.1 inside Parallels Desktop 9 in Mavericks (mac)

I have an ASUS Xonar Essence STX soundcard (PCI-Express) connected, is there any hope of making it work inside the windows virtual machine it parallels?

By default it won't detect it ofcourse - http://take.ms/qgxZe - the card isn't showing up in Sound or Device manager and the installation process for the STX drives dies saying that it's not connected, though it IS connected, and works fine on a natural windows system booted from another SSD drive (I have dualboot).

I'm aware that the card itself is deadly incompatible with macs and it's not really designed to work that way but still, is there anything possible to play around to make it work inside a parallels virtual machine?

Answer 1

There's a pretty long list of requirements to be able to do this at all.

Firstly, you need a processor with VT-D (or IOMMU, but that's for AMD processors, and no Apple hardware uses those), and a motherboard that supports this. I'm unsure if any 'official' apple hardware supports it at all, but its possible none of them do.

Secondly, you need a virtualisation software that supports passthrough, and these are typically KVM on linux and ESXi. I'm not aware of any that run on OS X.

With these two, and proper configuration, it may work - its more common to do this with GPUs rather than sound cards.

So, chances are, no, there's no way this could work.