Part 1 – Defining the requirements and flashing the Dell PERC H200 SAS card. So there you have it! PCI passthrough works great, and is as close as you can get to a physical FreeNAS build on an ESXi host. This definitely make sense to me given there isn’t even a P21 firmware out yet. Normally, FreeNAS would complain about firmware and driver mismatches if the 20.x firmware isn’t matched with the 20.x driver, but apparently the 21.x driver included in FreeNAS 9.10 is indeed compatible with the 20.x firmware. Memory at fd580000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable)Ĭapabilities: Power Management version 3Ĭapabilities: Express Endpoint, MSI 00Ĭapabilities: MSI: Enable+ Count=1/1 Maskable- 64bit+Ĭapabilities: MSI-X: Enable- Count=15 Masked-Īnother note of interest is to see what driver and firmware version is loaded for this device: ~# dmesg | grep “mps0: Firmware” Memory at fd5f0000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) We can get some more adapter information using the verbose -v flag: ~# lspci -vĠ3:00.0 Serial Attached SCSI controller: LSI Logic / Symbios Logic SAS2008 PCI-Express Fusion-MPT SAS-2 (rev 03)įlags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 64, IRQ 18 Physical Disk > | VT-d/AMD-Vi | port 0x4000-0x40ff mem 0xfd5f0000-0xfd5fffff,0xfd580000-0xfd5bffff irq 18 at device 0.0 on pci3Īs you can see above, FreeNAS can clearly see an LSI SAS2008 based adapter at a specific PCI address on the system.Īlthough lspci is a linux tool, it does appear to work in the FreeBSD version FreeNAS utilizes. In fact, the data path would be packed with layers of abstraction and would look something like this: That said, using a virtual SCSI adapter and VMDK disks certainly does not qualify as ‘direct access’. After all, ignoring what’s in between, ones and zeros still make it to from FreeNAS to the disks. We want ZFS to manage all aspects of the drives and the storage pool and should remove all layers of abstraction between the FreeNAS OS and the drives themselves.Īs you probably know, FreeNAS works well enough as a virtual machine for lab purposes. For it to do this effectively – and safely – ZFS needs direct access to SATA or SAS drives. It combines the functionality of a logical volume manager and an advanced filesystem providing a whole slew of features including redundancy and data integrity. Why Not VMDK Disks?Īs mentioned in Part 1 of this series, FreeNAS makes use of ZFS, which is much more than just a filesystem. This would give me an opportunity to tinker with vt-d passthrough and put my freshly flashed Dell PERC H200 through its paces. But while I was looking around for suitable hardware for the build, I decided to try something that I’ve wanted to do for a long time – PCI passthrough. In Part 1 of this series, I discussed building a proper FreeNAS server and prepared a Dell PERC H200 by flashing it to an LSI 9211-8i in IT mode.
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