Best Controllers for PCI-pass-through

[Robert Smith]

I am about to start dabbing into the unsafe land of virtualization. What are the recommended [relatively] safe controllers and firmware versions for such venture?

IBM ServeRAID M1015 is on the hardware recommendations thread. Is this still the top recommended controller?

Thank you.

 

[demon]

The ServeRAID M1015 is a rebranded LSI SAS controller. The main reason it's suggested is because they're commonly available inexpensively on eBay (and sometimes on Amazon) pulled out of reclaimed IBM systems. I went ahead and used an LSI 9211-8i SAS controller (same chip, slightly different board configuration, after reflash it's using the same ROM) and it works perfectly well. I believe the 9207-8i is also well liked around here.

Edit: As far as the firmware version, you'll need to flash it to the LSI Phase 16 ROM. The driver in the FreeBSD kernel used for FreeNAS is a Phase 16 driver, and the ROM and driver versions need to match. You should crossflash to IT (Initiator Target) firmware, also, as that provides direct, raw drive access, no hardware RAID nonsense between the OS and drives.

Edit 2: Okay, not so much the 9207-8i. Dunno why I thought that one.

 

[Ericloewe]

... and the ROM and driver versions need to match...

Correct, but you're better off not flashing the ROM at all. It's useless in IT mode, has been known to cause trouble when multiple cards are present, has a bug in P16 that fails to show the drives during POST (leading some to worry unnecessarily) and eats up a few seconds of your life whenever you reboot the server.

More generally, your best option is to buy the cheapest LSI SAS 2008 or 2308 card you can get. In practice, this is almost always the M1015, for some reason.

The LSI 9211 and IBM M1015 both use an SAS 2008 - the latter is a rebranded LSI 9240, IIRC, which is an entry-level RAID controller. Cards that come configured as RAID controllers need to be crossflashed (it's safe). There are a few more models and a crapton of rebrands, so don't immediately discard other models.

The LSI 9207 uses an LSI SAS 2308, which is an upgraded, faster 2008 with PCI-e 3.0 support. It also has a crapton of rebrands and entry-level RAID variants.

 

[demon]

Correct, but you're better off not flashing the ROM at all. It's useless in IT mode, has been known to cause trouble when multiple cards are present, has a bug in P16 that fails to show the drives during POST (leading some to worry unnecessarily) and eats up a few seconds of your life whenever you reboot the server.

I actually meant the card's firmware, not the BIOS. I actually flashed the BIOS bit into mine, even though I now know I could have handily skipped that part. (I haven't bothered to go back, clear the flash, and just flash in the firmware image part, because it works as-is, and I haven't felt like dicking with it.)

Anyway, that's my digression.

 

[marbus90]

Can you check if you can configure Staggered Spinup on the M1015 that way?