Findings and exploration of Intel Optane 900p Under ESXI

[marcoi]

so Freebsd doesnt support paravirtual scsi per esxi guide

It does support nvme control. I was able to confirm in a test freenas vm it does show up with drive.
Now not sure which i should use in freenas, nvme or default scsi for adding 900P drives via datasto

update: I did some testing between nvme connected drive and scsi connected drive with a test freenas. Seems like the nvme won benchmark tests so that is what I plan on using on testing on my real freenas server.

 

[marcoi]

Testing vmotion of 200GB drive from one pool to a new pool of 8 100GB SSD drives in raid 10 with 30GB ZIL from 900p.
You can see it has no issues keeping up with the source (Backup_Rz1_8TB)

Time from vcenter:

Disk size as reported in vcenter

This was via ISCI Source to NFS share Dest from esxi host to freenas server.

                                           capacity     operations    bandwidth
pool                                    alloc   free   read  write   read  write
--------------------------------------  -----  -----  -----  -----  -----  -----
Backup_Rz1_8TB                          7.30T  14.4T  12.8K     84   196M   409K
  raidz1                                7.30T  14.4T  12.8K     83   196M   407K
    gptid/e59bbf88-9a34-11e7-8ec0-005056b7ee49      -      -  2.88K     23  71.3M   266K
    gptid/e65bc623-9a34-11e7-8ec0-005056b7ee49      -      -  2.84K     19  70.7M   274K
    gptid/e70b53ca-9a34-11e7-8ec0-005056b7ee49      -      -  2.22K     22  64.9M   264K
logs                                        -      -      -      -      -      -
  gptid/ed45641c-c8c5-11e7-b592-005056b7ee49    16K  29.7G      0      0      0  2.00K

--------------------------------------  -----  -----  -----  -----  -----  -----
VM_Datastore_R10_SSD                     153G   211G      0  5.29K      0   432M
  mirror                                38.4G  52.6G      0    534      0  53.3M
    gptid/b5949c24-c8c6-11e7-b592-005056b7ee49      -      -      0    502      0  53.4M
    gptid/b6021d7d-c8c6-11e7-b592-005056b7ee49      -      -      0    501      0  53.4M
  mirror                                38.3G  52.7G      0    529      0  53.4M
    gptid/b678970b-c8c6-11e7-b592-005056b7ee49      -      -      0    497      0  53.5M
    gptid/b6e5e94b-c8c6-11e7-b592-005056b7ee49      -      -      0    494      0  53.5M
  mirror                                38.3G  52.7G      0    520      0  54.6M
    gptid/b760b4c9-c8c6-11e7-b592-005056b7ee49      -      -      0    493      0  54.7M
    gptid/b7dab7e0-c8c6-11e7-b592-005056b7ee49      -      -      0    495      0  54.7M
  mirror                                38.4G  52.6G      0    566      0  53.6M
    gptid/b8626866-c8c6-11e7-b592-005056b7ee49      -      -      0    526      0  53.6M
    gptid/b8da0f53-c8c6-11e7-b592-005056b7ee49      -      -      0    527      0  53.6M
logs                                        -      -      -      -      -      -
  gptid/b94c2a4e-c8c6-11e7-b592-005056b7ee49   252M  29.5G      0  3.19K      0   217M

 

[CoadyTech]

Are you using hardware or software RAID there? I keep debating whether to invest in some SATA/SAS SSD's, but I'm worried the performance won't be anywhere near NVMe.

 

[marcoi]

I'm running FreeNas as a VM on dell R720. I'm passing through two HBA cards, 9300-8i and 9300-8e. So all the storage connects via those cards. I then use NFS and ISCI mounts back to my ESXI hosts for other VMs to use for bulk storage.

 

[littleNewton]

Hello guys.

I bought a Optane 900P 280GB U.2 and I want to use it on TrueNAS virtual machine. My hypervisor is VMware ESXi 7.0U3f, and I connot find this disk in the PICe device panel. However, I can see it in the Storage control panel with 260+GB size.

Could someone tell me something about the PassThrough operation?

 

[marcoi]

Hello guys.

I bought a Optane 900P 280GB U.2 and I want to use it on TrueNAS virtual machine. My hypervisor is VMware ESXi 7.0U3f, and I connot find this disk in the PICe device panel. However, I can see it in the Storage control panel with 260+GB size.

Could someone tell me something about the PassThrough operation?

you probably need to pass through the whole storage device where the u.2 drive is attached to. problem is if your other storage is being used by that one storage adapter you will lose all access to it within ESXI host. I think in the past, i just created the data storage in ESXI and attached that to the truenas VM. If you got the PCIE version of the device then i think you could pass through directly. but i vaguely recall that truenas had issues with the device back in the day and no idea if it was ever fixed.
so my recommendation is keep it simple. create a data store of the device and add it to the VM as a disk.

 

[Rand__]

I did the same, but some ppl had success with editing /etc/vmware/passthru.map, but that never worked for me iirc

 

[wifiholic]

Hello guys.

I bought a Optane 900P 280GB U.2 and I want to use it on TrueNAS virtual machine. My hypervisor is VMware ESXi 7.0U3f, and I connot find this disk in the PICe device panel. However, I can see it in the Storage control panel with 260+GB size.

Could someone tell me something about the PassThrough operation?

If all is well, Optane storage devices should show up in PCI Devices, where you can use the Toggle Passthrough button to enable passthrough. Is VT-d enabled in your system's BIOS?



This particular Optane is being passed through to a TrueNAS Scale VM where it's serving as the L2ARC device. I have a 900p that I want to install and pass through to use as a SLOG, but haven't gotten around to it yet.