Mellanox connectX-2 on TrueNAS Scale

[eirik.lars1]

I'm looking to transition from Core to Scale. I have a Mellanox connectX-2 10GbE network card installed that has been working on Core. Does anyone know if this card is supported in Scale?

 

[alex992]

it is working fine for me

 

[eirik.lars1]

@alex992 Thank you for confirming

 

[jgreco]

Does anyone know if this card is supported in Scale?

It's not really a recommended card, but it should work.

 

[eirik.lars1]

It's not really a recommended card, but it should work.

I installed scale and the card seems to be working ok. Are there some issues I should be aware of ?

 

[jgreco]

Are there some issues I should be aware of ?

The Mellanox ConnectX-2 is a PCIe 2.0 card, and if I recall correctly, lacks some of the offload features the recommended Chelsio cards have. Of course, the ConnectX-2 cards have "cheap cheap cheap" on their side.

 

[eirik.lars1]

The Mellanox ConnectX-2 is a PCIe 2.0 card, and if I recall correctly, lacks some of the offload features the recommended Chelsio cards have. Of course, the ConnectX-2 cards have "cheap cheap cheap" on their side.

Thanks for pointing that out. Does the lack of offload mean I would see more cpu usage then? I bought the cards in 2018 excactly because they were cheap as you say.

 

[jgreco]

Thanks for pointing that out. Does the lack of offload mean I would see more cpu usage then? I bought the cards in 2018 excactly because they were cheap as you say.

It *could* mean more CPU usage, yes. On the other hand, not all chipsets that have offload available actually have driver support for it, so it's entirely possible that it doesn't matter.

Without a description of your NAS, it's also entirely possible that you won't reach 10Gbps speeds even with the best ethernet chipset. For the obvious example, a system with a single 6Gbps SATA drive (~250MBytes/sec, ~2Gbps) clearly cannot fill a 10Gbps pipe on its own, and even a 100 drive array may have problems doing so if there's a lot of seeking involved.