The proper way to configure a Fibre Channel connection between a Windows 2019 Server and FreeNAS

[systemlordanubis]

I followed this wonderful resource to enable Fibre Channel support within FreeNAS, even though I realize Fibre Channel isn't officially supported in FreeNAS.

• My intention is to link this FreeNAS server to a Windows 2019 Server purely as a backup storage device, and in each of the FreeNAS and Windows servers, I have a QLogic QLE2672 card with 2x 8G fibre connections, both of which are direct-patched between the two servers.
  • I've loaded the QLogic drivers onto the Windows Server and when using the QLogic GUI, I can see the ports linked.
  • In Windows Disk Manager, I can see the block drives from FreeNAS, however, the link doesn't appear to be stable and I've noticed that often one of the ports goes to 'disabled' or 'loop down', and, when writing to the disk from Windows, it starts out ok then completely freezes.
• I was hoping to have the two links configured either as load balancing (active/active) or primary/redundant, and I'm suspecting there's something amiss with my configuration/setup of the fibre-channel links.

Can anyone shine any light on what I might be missing from this configuration or perhaps point me in the direction of some resources that might help, as a search on the topic doesn't really bring up anything helpful?

 

[sretalla]

what are you seeing from gmultipath list ? or if you do a bit of digging with gmultipath?

 

[systemlordanubis]

Hi, sorry it took so long to revert.

When running the gmultipath list command, this produces no output at all. I've confirmed on the windows-server side that the driver is using the Free NAS MPIO driver and I can see two connection there.

Should this also show in output of gmultipath?

 

[JoeAtWork]

Hi, sorry it took so long to revert.

When running the gmultipath list command, this produces no output at all. I've confirmed on the windows-server side that the driver is using the Free NAS MPIO driver and I can see two connection there.

Should this also show in output of gmultipath?

Systemlordanubi did you get this figured out?

I boot a vmware 8.0 usb drive and see if the luns show up as destinations for the esxi install disk. If that does not work I would make sure you can get the luns to show up via iscsi and then try fiber channel again.

The windows multipath might be your issue, I have used vmware ESXi with round robin for many years and no issues on many versions of truenas and freenas.