P822

[PetrZ]

Hi. I was reading all I found here about P822 card and I have few questions.

E.g. @jgreco wrote:

"HBA mode" is insufficient. The ciss driver in FreeBSD does not work that well under the heavy loads FreeNAS and ZFS can place on it, and things such as error handling and reporting are somewhat "off" as well. This is not something anyone should be trying to do.

1. Is that something, what will never change? I mean if there is a chance, that ciss driver in 11.3 or newer systems will work better or will be replaced by another driver?
2. Is such a card safe to be used at least for the backup pool (just receiving replicated snapshots from another box)?
3. Can you recommend some better choice with at least 8i8e? P822 has 8i16e.
4. Is it possible to use them without issues under GNU/Linux? I plan to use on some box virtualized FreeNAS under Debian 10 + ZoL + KVM. An original idea was to pass-through one P822 dedicated to FreeNAS VM, but in the light of the information I found, it's probably not the best idea. Any good solution here?

I have a few of them and I also don't have enough PCIe slots in some HP DLs to use e.g. few H220 + H221.

 

[Elliot Dierksen]

I would bet that it will never change. Those are older cards, and HP doesn't have good support for FreeBSD. I have some experience with these cards, and I would echo jgreco's sentiment to not go there. The slots aren't an issue if you pull the P822 and replace it with an LSI 9207-8i or something comparable.

 

[PetrZ]

The slots aren't an issue if you pull the P822 and replace it with an LSI 9207-8i or something comparable.

It is a problem because P822 is 8i16e. 9207-8i is just 8i, so there is a need to install another card(s) providing another 4 external physical ports / 16e. I use external disk enclosures. I work for an NGO, so the budget is quite low and I can not simply replace existing servers e.g. by new ones with more PCIe slots and install there a bunch of HBA cards.

I was also wondering about power consumption/heat produce. If I will use instead of each P822 e.g. 1x H220 (8i) + 2x H221 (2x8e), will be power consumption the same and produced heat also? I don't think so. Speed is not a big issue, but it should be reliable and cheap.

For smaller systems, I can get HP 9217-4i4e (for £36) and try to flash it to IT mode. E.g. for DL180 G6, where is 4i used for 12x3.5" backplane and 4e for a single external enclosure. But somewhere I would need 8i and at least 8e.

 

[Elliot Dierksen]

I was also wondering about power consumption/heat produce. If I will use instead of each P822 e.g. 1x H220 (8i) + 2x H221 (2x8e), will be power consumption the same and produced heat also? I don't think so. Speed is not a big issue, but it should be reliable and cheap.

My experience has been that the P822's run really hot. You can get 9207's (8e or 8i) on eBay for ~=$50, so you aren't talking about a huge investment there. The HP-ized versions of those cards should be in a similar range. I think there are flavors of LSI HBA's that have a 4i4e, but I haven't really needed them. The systems I use for my FreeNAS units have plenty of slots, so it has never been an issue for me.