Passing hard drive to the virtual machine ( when no VT-D pass-through available)

• We will create vmsk files, one per hard drive. To keep things organized, first create a folder in the regular datastore and cd to it.

• Find vml symlink pointing to the disk we are adding for pass-through
  

ls -l /dev/disks

....
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 72 Nov 20 10:54 vml.0100000000533248374a31425a39323131323220202020202053414d53554e -> t10.ATA_____SAMSUNG_HD204UI_________________________S2H7J1BZ921122______
...

• Create vmdk file. Specify vml symlink we just found
  

# vmkfstools -z /vmfs/devices/disks/vml.0100000000533248374a31425a39323131323220202020202053414d53554e SAMS01.vmdk

• Now, this file can be added to virtual machine as a pre-existing virtual disk. This will be your whole physical device passed untouched to the virtual machine, with no any intervention from ESXi on data level. ( it does not look like virtual machine can do low-level control of the drive, like SMART or disk spin-downs)