Notes: using Freenas as a SAN with Fibre Channel

[slushieken]

Wanted to add this before the info gets stale or I forget to. Bottom line is that it does work well with some QLogic cards.

1. As best as I can determine, the only Fibre Channel card that is really supported is Qlogic, using the FreeBSD isp driver. This driver is already installed in the base FreeNAS 9.3, and probably higher. If someone else has more info on this please share.

2. The QLE246x specifically is an optical link 4Gb interface, and is the highest hardware shown as supported by the ISP driver for FreeBSD. The 'x' specifies the number of FC ports on the card, be it 1, 2, or 4. This device is dirt cheap now - I picked up a 2 port for $14 from ebay.

3. You will have to configure the FC card to use only 512k packets - no larger. If you use anything higher, it will work for a while, say an hour to 2 days, then FreeNAS will spontaneously reboot; even when there is no activity on the FC. Nothing appears in the FreeNAS logs when this happens; a few entries may appear on the initiator. So if you find that your FreeNAS has rebooted unexpectedly, check this.

FC packet size is configured in the Qlogic BIOS during the boot process. Enter the card BIOS (Fast!Util) during boot with Ctrl-Q and configure each port. It can probably be done with lsiutil as well if you have that working (I didn't).

I will add more information in the future, like:

a) FC Card BIOS Settings - what do they mean? What works?
b)

 

[kb1ujs]

Thanks for this information. I'm looking to do the same thing with the exact same hardware, so this gives me the confidence I need to try to implement this.

Are you connecting multiple servers to your FreeNAS using the multiport card?

 

[slushieken]

Not exactly yet, but I am using 2 dual port adapters right now, one port on each to one Virtual Host, and it works great.

I have a second system I am going to use as a second virtual host, also but I have not ran it up yet. I do not expect any problems.

Uptime of several weeks now on the whole thing, and end to end no interruptions to service yet!