I'm trying to combine my virtualization (Proxmox VE) and filer (OpenIndiana Hipster) together into one physical system to save on power but had a frustrating time with it yesterday. I can install OpenIndiana as a VM just fine - but when I pass through an LSI SAS HBA to it, suddenly it fails to boot (it boots in a loop and quickly flashes a kernel crash that I can't read well before it cycles again). I think it's the same problem reported here and here a few years ago.
I tried the same with a Linux guest and it worked fine so I don't think Proxmox is at fault here (or my hardware for that matter) as I could see and use all of the disks on the HBA - but I have preferred solarish for filers for a few years now due to the well-integrated nature of ZFS+iSCSI+NFS+SMB. I know I can do all of those things from Linux, but I was hoping to get the best of both.
I tried passing through the physical volumes instead (via virtio and virtio-scsi) as I saw folks doing that and that worked, but while I don't have any hard scientific numbers behind it, the performance was quite poor. So bad that I'll probably go back to dedicated hardware for each role until I can figure it out.
I'm also wondering if my hardware might have anything to do with it. I'm using an X9SCM-f with a Xeon E3 v2. I've had trouble getting SR-IOV to work on this hardware due to ACS groups, but I think this should work as the HBA is in its own group - and again, it works with Linux as the guest. Still, it takes two to have an incompatibility.
Has anyone gotten PCI passthrough of a SAS HBA to a solarish system working under Proxmox? I've read of people doing this with VMware ESXi as the hypervisor, but not under KVM.
I tried the same with a Linux guest and it worked fine so I don't think Proxmox is at fault here (or my hardware for that matter) as I could see and use all of the disks on the HBA - but I have preferred solarish for filers for a few years now due to the well-integrated nature of ZFS+iSCSI+NFS+SMB. I know I can do all of those things from Linux, but I was hoping to get the best of both.
I tried passing through the physical volumes instead (via virtio and virtio-scsi) as I saw folks doing that and that worked, but while I don't have any hard scientific numbers behind it, the performance was quite poor. So bad that I'll probably go back to dedicated hardware for each role until I can figure it out.
I'm also wondering if my hardware might have anything to do with it. I'm using an X9SCM-f with a Xeon E3 v2. I've had trouble getting SR-IOV to work on this hardware due to ACS groups, but I think this should work as the HBA is in its own group - and again, it works with Linux as the guest. Still, it takes two to have an incompatibility.
Has anyone gotten PCI passthrough of a SAS HBA to a solarish system working under Proxmox? I've read of people doing this with VMware ESXi as the hypervisor, but not under KVM.
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