Supermicro MOBO SATA passthrough + ESXi - will it work?

[francisaugusto]

Hi,

I'm considering to move my FreeNAS to a bit more modern setup. It's a home file server, no need for fancy video transcoding or things of this sort.
I've read a lot on this forum and elsewhere on the caveats of installing FreeNAS as a VM. I believe the main advice was to use a HBA in order to get the disks assigned exclusively to the OS/VM.

But I've seen very little on successful cases of internal SATA controller passthrough. My plan is to either get a SuperMicro E300-8D or its motherboard and mount it on a Node 304 case. This seems like a good choice to me as I would have a compact form factor but with plenty of room for my storage needs and 10GBe network as well.

Therefore, I would like to avoid relying on an HBA, as it might not fit the E300-8D-chassis, or might be too big for node 304 case. Either way, anyone running a similar, SuperMicro based setup + ESXi + storage passthrough?

 

[jgreco]

PCIe passthru has been pretty solid since the days of the X9 boards (~2011-now). I've got several D-1537's in such roles and they're fine.

Your problem will be that you still need a place for your VM's to reside. If you were thinking that this would be on the FreeNAS storage, that won't work for the FreeNAS VM itself, and can be annoying or twitchy for the other VM's.

I don't know how the controller(s) on the board you list are organized and quite frankly I haven't the time to look. If they present as different PCIe devices, you can pass thru one for FreeNAS and use the other for VM storage. Given how freakin' cheap SSD is, get yourself a nice 1TB SSD for your VM's and install ESXi and any important VM's on it.

 

[francisaugusto]

PCIe passthru has been pretty solid since the days of the X9 boards (~2011-now). I've got several D-1537's in such roles and they're fine.

Thanks a lot, @jgreco! Really encouraging!

Your problem will be that you still need a place for your VM's to reside. If you were thinking that this would be on the FreeNAS storage, that won't work for the FreeNAS VM itself, and can be annoying or twitchy for the other VM's.

I don't know how the controller(s) on the board you list are organized and quite frankly I haven't the time to look. If they present as different PCIe devices, you can pass thru one for FreeNAS and use the other for VM storage. Given how freakin' cheap SSD is, get yourself a nice 1TB SSD for your VM's and install ESXi and any important VM's on it.

I was actually thinking going that way, or, even better, maybe using the Satadom or something like that, but it seems it uses one of the SATA slots, so I don't know. I am not even sure the PCIe device where I could install an M2 SSD will be independent.

I couldn't find what's the controller on the X10SDV Mini-ITX Series motherboard. It only say it's a SoC.

 

[jgreco]

No, it looks like the Lynx Point AHCI is a single device, at least that's what's showing on one hypervisor here. That system has the X10SDV-7TP4F, which is the amped-up version of what you're looking at.

If you have an NVMe SSD for boot, I *suspect* that'd work. Pass through the Lynx Point and get yourself a super fast NVMe SSD for ESXi and VM datastore. But I can't promise it'll work. We boot from RAID1 here.

 

[francisaugusto]

No, it looks like the Lynx Point AHCI is a single device, at least that's what's showing on one hypervisor here. That system has the X10SDV-7TP4F, which is the amped-up version of what you're looking at.

If you have an NVMe SSD for boot, I *suspect* that'd work. Pass through the Lynx Point and get yourself a super fast NVMe SSD for ESXi and VM datastore. But I can't promise it'll work. We boot from RAID1 here.

thanks! I actually searched more and am decided to get the x11sdv-4c-tln2f instead. Hopefully it will work as well. Oh, well, if not I’ll get a HBA and plug it on the PCIe slot and then use a normal SATA SSD from the board controller.