Setting up an EchoVR Spectator on a VM

Setting up an ESXi VM with the intent of running a spectator bot for Echo VR

Notes: These instructions are somewhat specific to the hardware being used. In my case I’m running a Dell PowerEdge R720. Initial testing was using a Windows 10 Pro x64 VM on ESXi 6.7.0 with two 2.3GHz cores, 8GB of DDR3, and an AMD R7 250 video card with 2GB memory. These instructions should be adaptable depending on your setup.

• First step is to make sure “Virtualization Technology” is enabled in the “Processor” settings.
  

• Next enable “SR-IOV” in the “Integrated Devices” settings.
  

This info can be found in Dell’s support document Article Number: 000144029

After you make sure those settings are enabled you need to boot ESXi and change some settings in your web GUI.

Configure ESXi to passthrough the video card.

1. Make sure any VMs are shut down before making changes.
2. Enter Maintenance Mode on the ESXi host.
3. Go to Manage > Hardware > PCI Devices
4. Scroll through the list of devices till you find your video card.
5. Select the video card then click “Toggle Passthrough” to enable passthrough on the card.
6. Reboot the host and when it finishes rebooting go back to verify the card shows “Active” on the passthrough column.
7. Exit Maintenance Mode
   

Configure the VM with the video card

1. Select the VM and make sure it is shut down
2. Right click on the virtual machine and select “Edit Settings”
3. Select the “Virtual Hardware” tab
4. Click “Add other Device”
5. Select “PCI Device”
6. At the bottom of the window you will see a line for the new PCI device you are adding. From there use the drop down menu to select your video card.
7. Click “Save” after you are done selecting the card.
8. Next you must go to the Memory setting for the VM. Expand it and select “Reserve all guest memory (All locked)”. From my experience the VM wouldn’t boot if this isn’t selected.
9. Click “Save” again to save your changes.
10. Double check under “Video Card” to make sure 3D graphics aren’t enabled. That is for the VMware SVGA 3D graphics. If they are enabled they may cause a conflict and take priority over your video card.
    

Search google for "mellanox 15053105" for the article that specified how to setup the video card.

Note regarding NVIDIA video cards

For NVIDIA cards you will have to manually enter in some parameters to make them work. Without entering in the parameters your NVIDIA graphics card will Code 43 in Windows 10.

Go to the VM in question > Edit > VM Options > Advanced >Edit Configuration > Add Parameter

hypervisor.cpuid.v0 = FALSE
pciPassthru0.msiEnabled = FALSE
pciPassthru.use64bitMMIO="TRUE"


Search google for "VMware 1421898" for the forum post that specified how to setup NVIDIA video cards.

From there it should be a simple matter of installing the Oculus PC program and Echo VR. You will need a second Oculus account as mentioned in the program’s documentation. Follow the spectator bot’s instructions for setup.

Additional notes regarding using Microsoft Remote Desktop (RDP) to access your computer

When using RDP to access your computer you may run into issues with "Oculus App Status: Can't reach Oculus service" error and Echo Arena not being able to launch. To solve this you will have to manually launch OVRServer_x64 every time you remote into the computer. That file can be found at C:\Program Files\Oculus\Support\oculus-runtime Once Echo Arena is running you can close RDP if you want. You may need to get a dummy plug or leave a monitor hooked up to the video card output to force a resolution you want. Otherwise leaving RDP running while streaming seems to work as well.

Credit to "DualGame" on discord for the solution.