HP NC340T Quad GB Ethernet PCI-X

[cmdematos]

I have one of these on the way to me and I am wondering whether FreeNas supports it. Its not listed directly on the list, but sometimes that is not definitive.

If the card is not supported, is there a good PCI-X Quad Gigabit card that you can recommend? iScsi, Jumbo Frames and full duplex is what I am looking for.

 

[marbus90]

Interesting, haven't seen PCI-X Slots in a while.

Do you probably mean PCI-Express?

 

[jgreco]

Probably means PCI-X since the NC340T is an HP-badged Intel Pro-1000 adapter, I'm pretty sure it is the PWLA8494GT. There's no reason I can think of it shouldn't work, it's been around since the mid-2000's and supported in FreeBSD for just about as long. Should pop up under the em driver. We've got some of the actual Intel 8494GT cards rattling around here in FreeBSD boxes and they are real reliable workhorses.

 

[marbus90]

It's just that I have seen more than once people who wanted to/bought PCI-X cards in assumption that they would run in PCIe slots.

 

[cmdematos]

These are going into 4x Dell Precision T5500 motherboards (1x PCI, 1x PCI-X, 4x PCIe) set into some 4U server chassis. Currently each has 4 disks (4x250, 4x500, 4x1Tb, 4x2Tb) running raid 10 off of Dell Perc 5 Raid controllers (512Mb cache). Each server has 3 Gb ethernet (1x + 2x). I want to consolidate the disks into one of the chassis, spread the 250s as system and local disks and install FreeNas on that one with 7 ports (the HP NC340T), add a 120Gb SSD for the ARC and logs and team 2 ethernet ports against each of the remaining servers as the iscsi backplane.

Thats the plan in any way, currently failing terribly. I followed instructions from several blogs, I can get ESX to connect to FreeNas 9.3 and 9.2.1.9 but dang it if it won't recognize any devices on the iSCSI at all.

Any hints will be greatly appreciated.

 

[jgreco]

You really don't want to be using a RAID controller for the disks attached to FreeNAS. ZFS will take care of managing the disks for you.

Make sure you've read the FreeNAS manuals (linked at the top of this page) for setting up iSCSI. It's not trivial but it does work.