All in one system - 990FX!

[Wally Simmonds]

Hey guys,

Thought I'd post here and share my experiences, and also ask for some advice. Basically, what I've got:

Gigabyte 990FXA-UD3 with IOMMU
Athlon X4 640
16GB
8x2TB disks
Dell Perc 6i controller.

And I'm running on ESXi 4.1 update 1. Bit of a mission to get the OS on there, as USB boot wouldn't work!

I'm booting ESX off local disk and what I'm trying to do is present through my perc 6i controller through to a Freenas 8 VM. Now, while the passthrough seems to work okay I can't for the life of me get Freenas to see it. I've configured the loader.conf with mfi_load="YES", which didn't seem to do anything. On the controller itself I have a single disk presented through in Raid 0. I know this works as my 2008 VM (when configuring passthrough to that VM) can see it fine. On the Freenas guest I have run pciconf -lv via the console and it seems to be picking the controller up ok.

Has anyone done anything similar? Please bear in mind I'm very noobie to Freebsd, so haven't done very much troubleshooting at all =/. At this stage my guess is something driver related on the Freenas VM. I have also tried Freenas 0.7 to no avail.

I would appreciate any help.

Thanks,
Wally

 

[Mackintire]

Shouldn t you be trying to use the iscsi protocol to do this?

 

[lopoetve]

mackintire, you're not quite getting what he's trying.

Wally, are you planning on using ZFS for something? If not, there may be better alternatives.

 

[danswartz]

Sounds like it might be a driver issue? Are you firmly wedded to FreeNAS? If not, give OpenIndiana+napp-it a shot...

 

[Wally Simmonds]

Definitely think it's drivers. Not tied to Freenas, but it had a nice interface, and wanted to use ZFS. Will look into napp-it

 

[danswartz]

I've been running OI+napp-it for a couple of months now and has been rock-solid...