Virtual machines including VirtualBox and KVM/QEMU support direct access to PCI devices (using a technology known as "passthrough"). I was able to pass through my NI PCI-6259 to a Windows 7 guest running on a Linux host. NI-MAX (running on the guest) detects the card fine and the self-test passes. However, when I load the test panels and run the analog input test, I don't see any plots on the screen. The card works fine in a Windows 7 computer.
The reason why we are trying to set up NI to work in a virtual machine is because we have other pieces of software and hardware that work better under Linux. We are trying to avoid having a multi-computer setup if possible.
Has anyone successfully gotten data acquisition working using PCI passthrough?