Lost and confused...

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StevenDTX

Active Member
Aug 17, 2016
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I have been through a bit of a journey recently with Napp-It. This was my first go around with ZFS. I ran FreeNAS with an Areca card and 10Gb iSCSI for a couple of years.

I was lucky to score an Intel Optane 900P a while back when they were on sale on Amazon. I deployed a Napp-IT VM (OmniOS), using the OVA, passed through my SATA HBA, FC HBAs and the Optane. All was great! I was able to create the ZFS pool, create the FC targets, etc. I was using 8Gb FC HBAs and I felt that I was leaving some performance on the table and the 8Gb HBAs were the limiting factor. I confirmed that my using 10Gb iSCSI.

About that time, the Connect-X3s were dropping in price, so I picked up a few. I have installed one in each of my ESXi compute nodes, and one in my ESXi storage node. I currently have the two ESXi compute nodes directly connected to the storage node. No switch is involved.

This is where I am confused. All of my ESXi boxes are 6.7. The OmniOS couldn't see the Connect-X3 cards. From what I have read, that is to be expected as the drivers are not included/supported.

I deployed a Solaris 11.4 VM, installed Napp-IT and configured a new pool. The existing pool would not import as it said the ZFS version was newer or something. No big deal as it didn't have any data on it yet.

I can see the card in Solaris/Napp-IT, but I have no idea how to configure it so I can present the LUNs to the other ESXi hosts. Also, am I allowed to run Solaris, or will it eventually "expire"?




Any help of what to do next would be greatly appreciated.

If this wont work, I will just save my pennies for some 16Gb HBAs and switch back to OmniOS. I believe the Emulex 16002 is supported on OmniOS.
 

StevenDTX

Active Member
Aug 17, 2016
493
173
43