Fusion-io ioDrive 2 1.2TB Reference Page

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i386

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You can't boot from the iodrive2.
Performance wise the optane 900p outperforms the iodrive in all (synthetic & "real life" )benchmarks.

The 800k iops was for the iodrive2 duo (two normal iodrive2 on one pcb).
 
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acquacow

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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.
 
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i386

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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.
Will test it this weekend and report on the results :D

If it works with UEFI shouldn't it work with bios too?
 

acquacow

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Will test it this weekend and report on the results :D

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.

I think you'll need an HP/dell/supermicro motherboard to get it to work.

Sent from my Moto Z (2) using Tapatalk
 

marcus556

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Feb 6, 2018
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You can't boot from the iodrive2.
Performance wise the optane 900p outperforms the iodrive in all (synthetic & "real life" )benchmarks.

The 800k iops was for the iodrive2 duo (two normal iodrive2 on one pcb).
Thanks, I think I may end up getting the 900p for my ESXi.

Sent from my Pixel 2 XL using Tapatalk
 
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BLinux

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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.

I think you'll need an HP/dell/supermicro motherboard to get it to work.

Sent from my Moto Z (2) using Tapatalk
is that special firmware publicly available, or is it just something that was internally developed and never made public?
 

i386

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@BLinux
It's in the normal firmware file (it's a normal zip file, you can open it in 7zip and look at it's content). The magic file to make the iodrive(s) bootable is probably "uefi-3.2.11.1581.rom".
 

acquacow

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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.
 

i386

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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.
"Error: Firmware does not support UEFI." :(
 

acquacow

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Probably have to copy in some of the manifest info from the 3TB ioScale definitions...

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LFletcher

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I purchased a Fusion-IO ioScale2 1.65TB from eBay a few weeks ago.

The fan on the board is quite loud and whiny.
Has anyone replaced the fan on one of these boards or found a way to adjust it's use when not required?
 

acquacow

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I purchased a Fusion-IO ioScale2 1.65TB from eBay a few weeks ago.

The fan on the board is quite loud and whiny.
Has anyone replaced the fan on one of these boards or found a way to adjust it's use when not required?
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
 

MKO

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Jun 23, 2016
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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.
 

MKO

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I saw that but I was unsure if the iodrive would also support 512e but based on the documentation specifically saying to format it as 512b for esxi I guess not.
 

acquacow

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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?
That would be correct. The DRAM requirements are based on worst-case.

Would formatting the drive as 4k and configuring the drives with 512e in vsphere 6.5 be possible and provide any benefits?
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.

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.
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
 

MKO

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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.
 

lowfat

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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.
Sorry, what is ZoL?
 

benwis

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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!