ESXi 5.1, FreeNAS 8.20, Adaptec 5805 - No Drives

[DennisT]

I'm trying to set up FreeNAS 8.20 as a guest client on a new ESXi 5.1 host. I'm using a new Adaptec 5805 controller set up in JBOD mode. I have the Adaptec set up in passthrough mode in ESXi. Everything seems to be ok, except that I cannot see any drives.

As a test, I removed the PCI device from the FreeNAS client. Once that was complete I created a Win 7 VM and assigned the passthrough to it. After the Win 7 OS installed and I loaded the Adaptec drivers onto it I could see each of the drives. This tells me that passthrough in ESXi is working (at least for win clients)

So is there a trick to getting FreesNAS to recognize the drives?

 

[DennisT]

Figured it out - I didn't have the driver installed (even though the bootup did indicate there was a 5805 controller installed). Using Todd's post in this thread: http://forums.freenas.org/showthread.php?1564-Adding-driver-support-for-Adaptec-RAID-6805

I was able to get the driver to install. My install steps were slightly different, as I have a x64 install:

- Download the latest FreeBSD driver file (tgz) from Adaptec.
- Extract aac8x-amd64.tgz from the tgz file & place on msdos USB drive.
- insert usb drive into server.
- with client powered down add usb drive to client (Edit Settings – Hardware). Need to have USB controller added first.
- boot FreesNAS client
- Selected option 9 from the main menu to go to the FreeNAS shell
- mkdir /tmpusb
- mount –uw /
- mount -t msdosfs /dev/da1s1 /tmpusb
- cd /tmpusb
- pkg_add /tmpusb /aac8x-amd64.tgz
- umount /tmpusb
- rmdir /tmpusb
- reboot

Still need to remove usb from client's hardware list (client has to be shut down).

 

[pbucher]

Just a heads up, I was doing just about the same thing. I had compiled the aac driver from Adaptec's source with a 5804 and was loading the module and it was working fairly well. I did however have problems with not being able to shutdown the server it would hanging while trying to shutdown the aac driver. It would also hang from time to time. I ended up making physical raw drivers in ESXi and adding them to the VM. I benchmarked both ways and found I lost very little performance. I was able to export switch between the two methods without having to rebuild the zfs vol.

Post back in a couple of weeks if this works for you and maybe I'll give it another try(I was trying it with a early beta of 8.3). The physical raw driver setup is not supported by VMware and is a bit of a hack and I'd rather go back to doing it in a slightly less hacked up fashion. Also post what Firmware version your using, I've found the FreeBSD drivers from vendors to be very specific to the firmware version.

 

[cyberjock]

If you simply needed to add the Adaptec drivers, why not put in a ticket at support.freenas.org to have the drivers added? Then the drivers will be automatically included in all future released for you as well as anyone else.