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Well, with UEFI, you can boot from the ioDrive2, but we never fully supported the feature.
It does exist though and does work.
At the initial $/GB, it made NO sense to waste that storage on boot storage though... way cheaper to boot from a sata SSD, then put your datasets on FIO.
It does exist though and does work.
At the initial $/GB, it made NO sense to waste that storage on boot storage though... way cheaper to boot from a sata SSD, then put your datasets on FIO.
Will test it this weekend and report on the results
If it works with UEFI shouldn't it work with bios too?
You have to flash the firmware with special flags to enable uefi support. I forget what they are right now. And no, it won't work with normal bios because it requires a driver to make it look like a block device. That's the magic of uefi, you can load a low level driver into the bios before the OS boots.Will test it this weekend and report on the results
If it works with UEFI shouldn't it work with bios too?
I think you'll need an HP/dell/supermicro motherboard to get it to work.
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Thanks, I think I may end up getting the 900p for my ESXi.
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is that special firmware publicly available, or is it just something that was internally developed and never made public?
Yeah, it's in the firmware file, when you flash it, there's a flag like --enable-uefi or something, but it's not documented. Gotta run strings on it and see what uefi flags exist.
Rip the shroud off and stick a larger passive heatsink on, but make sure it has airflow.
The FPGA is always in use and needs 300 linear ft/min of airflow for cooling.
There is no fan control, don't try to slow it down...just get a large passive heatsink.
-- Dave
I've recently acquired a set of unused Fusion-io iodrive2 1.3 TB cards, was somewhat of a rushed deal so my research beforehand was lackluster.
Thanks to the resources in this topic I was able to figure out some of the requirements early on however some things still surprised me that was mainly due to my lack of experience with this kind of hardware.
The two thing that did surprise me are the memory requirements mentioned in the docs and the driver support for Linux and FreeBSD.
My home servers run Debian Stretch, Proxmox and Freenas at the moment but that is not gonna work well with these drives it seems.
As far as I am aware vsphere's VMFS is still 512b so that might create high RAM demands but based on a post from acquacow it would depend on the guest os doing the writing correct? So the ram usage mentioned in the docs is worst case based on heavy 512b io?
Based on my limited testing so far the RAM usage is not really all that bad. The card is currently in a whitebox AMD FX ESXi 5.5 system with 32GB of DDR3 memory. On a VM there I wrote a 800GB pseudo random file which caused the ram usage to climb to ~725MB.
Would formatting the drive as 4k and configuring the drives with 512e in vsphere 6.5 be possible and provide any benefits?
I am not sure at what level the vsl memory mapping is happening, so maybe when the os talks 512b but the drive internally handles everything as 4k it would require less memory while sacrificing some speed.
Thanks to the resources in this topic I was able to figure out some of the requirements early on however some things still surprised me that was mainly due to my lack of experience with this kind of hardware.
The two thing that did surprise me are the memory requirements mentioned in the docs and the driver support for Linux and FreeBSD.
My home servers run Debian Stretch, Proxmox and Freenas at the moment but that is not gonna work well with these drives it seems.
As far as I am aware vsphere's VMFS is still 512b so that might create high RAM demands but based on a post from acquacow it would depend on the guest os doing the writing correct? So the ram usage mentioned in the docs is worst case based on heavy 512b io?
Based on my limited testing so far the RAM usage is not really all that bad. The card is currently in a whitebox AMD FX ESXi 5.5 system with 32GB of DDR3 memory. On a VM there I wrote a 800GB pseudo random file which caused the ram usage to climb to ~725MB.
Would formatting the drive as 4k and configuring the drives with 512e in vsphere 6.5 be possible and provide any benefits?
I am not sure at what level the vsl memory mapping is happening, so maybe when the os talks 512b but the drive internally handles everything as 4k it would require less memory while sacrificing some speed.
That would be correct. The DRAM requirements are based on worst-case.
This would at worst case put you at the max memory utilization for 4k workloads, but could create additional write amplification/etc, which really also isn't an issue for home use. If you are running MS SQL/Oracle, and some other databases, they won't install correctly w/o 512b low level formatting.
This is a long answer, but the short answer is that the 4k mapping happens both at the drive and driver level. 512b writes would be slightly slower, but 4k and above would be at normal speeds.
-- Dave
I haven't really tried the cards with proxmox or recent linux kernels so sorry can't help you there.
I did upgrade one of my whitebox machines with FX-4100 CPU running ESXi 6.5 to 6.7 with the fusion IO card in it and so far the drivers seem to be working fine so we can hopefully run these cards in our ESX labs for a few more years.
As soon as my schedule allows for some tinkering time I will take a look at running a Fusion-IO card with proxmox or Debian. I'd really like to test it with ZFS but FreeBSD is not really supported atm so ZoL might be a good alternative.
I did upgrade one of my whitebox machines with FX-4100 CPU running ESXi 6.5 to 6.7 with the fusion IO card in it and so far the drivers seem to be working fine so we can hopefully run these cards in our ESX labs for a few more years
.As soon as my schedule allows for some tinkering time I will take a look at running a Fusion-IO card with proxmox or Debian. I'd really like to test it with ZFS but FreeBSD is not really supported atm so ZoL might be a good alternative.
Sorry, what is ZoL?I haven't really tried the cards with proxmox or recent linux kernels so sorry can't help you there.
I did upgrade one of my whitebox machines with FX-4100 CPU running ESXi 6.5 to 6.7 with the fusion IO card in it and so far the drivers seem to be working fine so we can hopefully run these cards in our ESX labs for a few more years
As soon as my schedule allows for some tinkering time I will take a look at running a Fusion-IO card with proxmox or Debian. I'd really like to test it with ZFS but FreeBSD is not really supported atm so ZoL might be a good alternative.
Hi everyone! I bought a 1.2TB IODrive 2 for 250 from a friend, but I'm not 100% sure how to set it up to run. I'm running Arch Linux and Windows 10 on my workstation. I want to use the drive to store some large datasets for machine learning, some docker instances, and a database or two. Can anyone point me towards a guide for getting the driver installed, and the firmware updated? I saw some mention of a dkms module, but I can't say I've really done much with these cards. Thanks!