This is a quick little post about something I ran into of late setting up an NVIDIA GRID M60 GPU on an ESXi 6.0 update 2 host. Though this should apply (haven’t tested) to all version of VMware ESXi as well as the M10 and M6 model GPUs (again haven’t tested).
The M60 card was installed and I had loaded the gpumodeswitch VIB on the ESXi host so I could validate that it was in graphics mode. I kept getting the following error anytime I tried to run the gpumodeswitch command:
ERROR: Read card info failed by using character device based.
The problem, as it turns out, is that passthrough was set for the card. If you get this error while you are setting up your GRID card (M60, M10, M6) , be sure to go to the hardware tab, scroll down to the NVIDIA card. If passthrough is enabled, select the card and toggle passthrough for the card. Once you’ve disabled passthrough you will need to reboot the host. Then you can run gpumodeswitch.
