So you want to test FC target mode?

[cmacnichol]

I think that's a fair assessment @cmacnichol. My personal take on FC is that it *can* be deployed with ZFS, and can be done relatively safely. The problem is that if you have that kind of knowledge and experience, you probably use FreeBSD and find FreeNAS to be too limiting and too "basic" for your needs. I talked to someone about FC once, and he said that it is not as easy as it looks on the surface, and if you don't have a deep understanding, you probably are screwing up.

He said something like "The litmus test is whether they need a guide to do FC on FreeNAS. If they do, they're certainly not qualified to do FC safely."

That right there fits everything I found out exactly.

For future reference, I was able to get the Fibre link up and running with PCI Pass through to a Server 2012 OS. The Drives on the Freenas side were just passed through whole as targets with no ZFS setup. This proved to be a mistake as my transfer speeds to the File Server (Win 2012 Server) were averaging around 40-55 Mb\s.

Conversely by Transfer speeds to\from a Freenas CIFS share on one of the drives was around 75-90 Mb\s. Fluctuating rapidly.

At this point, I decided that I was WAY over-thinking things.

I killed the PCI Pass-through, used the Natvie ESXI Fiber Initiator for the LUN's and then passed the disks to the 2012 Server VM via RDM.

Surprisingly, with the server specs I assigned, I am getting consistent 100-112 Mb\s speeds. Which is close to the theoretical maximum of 120 Mb\s for a GB network.

With all that found out, I have decided that due to the amount of storage I now have, 4 x 3TB and 4 x 1.5 tb for a total of 16+TB, I am adding the drives to Drive Bender to pool them and Duplicate the data that I need to multiple drives.

Ideally I would love to use ZFS and zPool to offer the whole amount directly with the redundancy and benefits of ZFS in the background, however my hardware setup just does not support it. Plus I am worried about the 1.5 TB drives as they have been sketchy for a while. Really do not want to lose everything if one Zvol were to fail in the pool.

Currently, I am attempting to get some good performance scores for the drives within Windows. Curious to see how much, if any, impact the Fibre link will have to them.

 

[gcs8]

Sooo, just thought I would share, this is 4 first gen WD greens in a "raid 10" over 4GB FC on FreeNAS 9.3.

NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
Tank ONLINE 0 0 0
mirror-0 ONLINE 0 0 0
gptid/5dce05ca-5f0f-11e4-8f6b-90e6ba881f3e ONLINE 0 0 0
gptid/5e8aa618-5f0f-11e4-8f6b-90e6ba881f3e ONLINE 0 0 0
mirror-1 ONLINE 0 0 0
gptid/5f402393-5f0f-11e4-8f6b-90e6ba881f3e ONLINE 0 0 0
gptid/60008dd3-5f0f-11e4-8f6b-90e6ba881f3e ONLINE 0 0 0