HP Pro 6300 BIOS missing option for VT-d

[AttilaSVK]

Hello,

I just got myself a second hand Pro 6300 minitower for virtualization purposes. I did find the VT-x option in the BIOS setup, but there's no VT-d at all. I'm running the latest version of the BIOS, 3.08 and my CPU is an i5 3470, which does support both VT-x and VT-d.

What's causing the problem and how to get VT-d working?

Thanks in advance for any kind of advice 🙂

Spoiler

[DGroves]

my 6300 pro SFF and the user manual for it both have VT-D listed are you looking in the correct place in the bios?

https://www.manualslib.com/manual/624149/Hp-Compaq-Pro-6300-Series-Microtower.html?page=28

1. Start the machine.
2. Press F10 to enter BIOS.
3. Security-> System Security
4. Enable Virtualization Technology (VTx) and Virtualization Technology Directed I/O (VTd).
5. Save and restart the machine.

[AttilaSVK]

That's where I was looking at, see the attached pictures in the spoiler section of my initial post.

[SDH]

My recollection is that this has come up before and that it is fixable.  I think you'll find the solution with deeper digging.  One issue is that VT is not available on all processors.  Another is that the BIOS settings can be obscure.

DGroves gives some advice from the past at  HERE .

https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Business-PCs-Workstations-and-Point-of-Sale-Systems/VT-X-and-VT-P-opti...

It may not be obvious but part of what he is stating here is that you should set back to HP factory settings.  That can take more than just pushing the CMOS reset button.  His is more of a reset of that on an advanced level.  Some of these settings can get corrupted on the firmware level, and there are methods of clearing that corruption.  We all have our own biases on the exact right way of doing that, but it is more than just pushing a yellow little button.  Then, sometimes a particular BIOS setting opens up access to another BIOS setting......

We don't use VT, but I remember looking this all up years ago and there is a solution if your processor supports it.

[SDH]

Try turning off hyperthreading, reboot, and check again.  Do that after you have done the advanced method of getting back to factory settings and checking that first.

[AttilaSVK]

I did reset the CMOS settings yesterday with the button, but it didn't help. I'll try installing Windows (on the bare metal), and run BiosConfigUtility to see what are my options, as right now on the ESXi hypervisor is installed.

The i5 3470 has no hyperthreading, so I can't really disable it 😉

[AttilaSVK]

Okay, so I installed BCU, read out all the settings, deleted the unneded parts from the config file, enabled VT-d and ran BCU again with the /set:config.txt parameter to enabled VTd. It tells me that there were no errors during the process, but after a reboot (or a shutdown and a repower) VTd is not visible in the Setup, not detected by ESXi (I installed Windows on a separate drive so I can switch back and forth between it and ESXi), and when I run BCU to read all the settings from the BIOS, it still says that VTd is disabled.

Restoring the defaults (either via BCU or via the CMOS reset button) still doesn't help.

[AttilaSVK · Accepted solution]

Problem solved. I had to dig up the HP PC Commercial BIOS (UEFI) Setup Administration Guide, where it was explicitly written, that in order to use VTd and TXt, TPM must be enabled (and thus, a setup password must be set).

After I enabled the TPM and configured everything with BCU, I still don't see VTd in setup, but it's enabled and ESXi now allows me to pass through some hardware.