X11SDV-4C-TP8F onboard HBA model?

[thatcherk1]

Hello all, this is my first post here. Very exciting.
I’m migrating my freenas build to a VM on ESXi. My understanding is that in order for HBA passthrough to work correctly I’ll need to flash my HBA to IT mode. I’ve searched and found some great guides on doing this. My question is that I’m not 100% sure what model HBA my motherboard has onboard. It might be the LSI 3008, but I can’t find any specific documentation about it.

Does anyone here know which model exactly this MoBo has?

Thanks!

 

[danb35]

From the Supermicro product page, that motherboard doesn't appear to have an onboard HBA.

 

[jgreco]

Supermicro spec sheet says the ports are provided by the SoC.

And just to correct a bad assumption, it isn't that you need to flash an HBA to IT for PCIe passthrough to work. The HBA can be passed through no matter what. It's that FreeNAS wants and needs IT firmware.

But since you don't seem to have an LSI HBA, you will need to find out if the SoC controller can be passed through. It probably can, but ESXi may not know about it by default. Ask for help if needed.

 

[thatcherk1]

Thanks for the replies. I read that the the Supermicro boards that have the larger capacity for sas/sata were generally LSI HBAs onboard. Bad assumption #1. I've been running my freenas with drives connected to 8 ports via SAS breakout. It's been working well and it appears that FreeNAS has been seeing these as individual drives with SMART access. So I thought that FreeNAS would work with IR-mode HBAs if installed on bare metal, and only ran into issues when run through ESXi. That was bad assumption #2.

There are two SATA controllers that I can passthrough. So I'll try passing one or both of those through and see what happens.

 

[jgreco]

Supermicro has always been opportunistic and will tend to take advantage of whatever hardware exists, such as PCH SATA or SAS SCU (Patsburg for example). Adding extra chips to a board always adds cost and complexity. They will absolutely add an HBA if a product offering requires more ports than are available, and on the flip side, sometimes you actually end up with relatively ridiculous-capability boards that have a pile of I/O even though they're oriented towards a 1U, or something like that.

Both IT and IR will work, bare metal or PCIe passthru, but here on the forums we discourage IR because it's slower and because there's more chance for "inadvertent configuration fsck-ups" due to the basic RAID capability of IR. I am not aware of any impairments with the IR firmware, but, that being said, almost no one does it, so it's hard to know for sure. I use IR FW HBA's for RAID-capable boot and it hasn't been a problem.

 

[zac_baker]

Would you need an HBA if you had a motherboard that already has enough SATA ports for what you need? Sorry, I'm a little new, and was wondering if I could get away with a build without an HBA. The motherboard I was considering using was an ASUS prime B450 Plus ATX, which has six SATA connectors. Also, another consideration with that was the motherboard is an AMD socket. Does this make a huge impact? I saw on the hardware requirements an Intel CPU was strongly suggested, so would an AMD Athlon 200GE be suitable? Thanks :D

 

[jgreco]

Would you need an HBA if you had a motherboard that already has enough SATA ports for what you need? Sorry, I'm a little new, and was wondering if I could get away with a build without an HBA. The motherboard I was considering using was an ASUS prime B450 Plus ATX, which has six SATA connectors. Also, another consideration with that was the motherboard is an AMD socket. Does this make a huge impact? I saw on the hardware requirements an Intel CPU was strongly suggested, so would an AMD Athlon 200GE be suitable? Thanks :D

1) No, you do not need an HBA if you have sufficient competent SATA mainboard ports.

2) We do not recommend the use of gaming, or really any non-server motherboards, for a whole slew of what will seem like trite reasons - until they bite you. For example, the Realtek LAN offered on most consumer boards is a hot spot for performance issues.

3) We encourage the use of ECC-capable systems to minimize the chance of data corruption. Server systems typically do this by default.

4) There's nothing inherently wrong with an AMD CPU. It's just that from around ~2011-2019, and especially in the earlier part of that span, we saw lots of crappy AMD APU based systems that were nightmares to debug, and most of the systems are aimed at the budget consumer market, which means they've cut every corner possible.

5) Intel-based server boards generally cut no corners and so you'll see a strong preference towards that. I am a primary guilty party in that I pushed heavily in these forums early on to discourage consumer grade boards, and pushed Supermicro quite heavily. Here at SOL, we were a primarily AMD shop from ~1993-2012 but the problem was you really had to do your research to find systems that were going to work well with FreeBSD (a small percentage). The requirement to do extensive research and testing is not particularly compatible with forum users, who typically look for the cheapest thing they can find on sale and then somehow expect that it is someone else's fault that FreeBSD doesn't work well on it. In any case, I freely disclose all this so that you may factor that into your evaluation of my opinion.

 

[thatcherk1]

Well, for what it's worth I got it working. I'm new to ESXi so definitely some learning curve, but I was able to get the system migrated over from bare metal. My pool mounted perfectly once I enabled passthrough. I was hoping to be able to mount my boot drive, which is also SATA through the passthrough, but it didn't want to recognize it.
I loaded my config file from my previous system and with a little network config I got everything up and running including jails.

 

[zac_baker]

1) No, you do not need an HBA if you have sufficient competent SATA mainboard ports.

2) We do not recommend the use of gaming, or really any non-server motherboards, for a whole slew of what will seem like trite reasons - until they bite you. For example, the Realtek LAN offered on most consumer boards is a hot spot for performance issues.

3) We encourage the use of ECC-capable systems to minimize the chance of data corruption. Server systems typically do this by default.

4) There's nothing inherently wrong with an AMD CPU. It's just that from around ~2011-2019, and especially in the earlier part of that span, we saw lots of crappy AMD APU based systems that were nightmares to debug, and most of the systems are aimed at the budget consumer market, which means they've cut every corner possible.

5) Intel-based server boards generally cut no corners and so you'll see a strong preference towards that. I am a primary guilty party in that I pushed heavily in these forums early on to discourage consumer grade boards, and pushed Supermicro quite heavily. Here at SOL, we were a primarily AMD shop from ~1993-2012 but the problem was you really had to do your research to find systems that were going to work well with FreeBSD (a small percentage). The requirement to do extensive research and testing is not particularly compatible with forum users, who typically look for the cheapest thing they can find on sale and then somehow expect that it is someone else's fault that FreeBSD doesn't work well on it. In any case, I freely disclose all this so that you may factor that into your evaluation of my opinion.

Thanks, I just wanted to be able to have ECC memory support (which the B450 chipset offers), and have a powerful enough motherboard to have enough VRM headroom for future upgrades up to an 8 core such as the R7 2700. At the moment, however, I just wanted to get something built and functional, and despite the 200GE lacking ECC memory support, higher tier models on the AM4 platform do support ECC memory. So, the two major issues I took out of your point were that 1. the LAN controller on the motherboard may become an issue with regards to performance, and 2. AMD APUs may have issues that are unforeseen due to a lack of QC on AMDs part for the budget CPUs. In addressing this, would it be sufficient to purchase a PCIe gigabit LAN card and essentially hoping the APU is okay? The only issue with Intel is their consumer platforms do not support ECC memory, which is something I want to be able to have as an upgrade path in the future, and the cheapest Xeon from my local PC store is $350 (NZD) [Xeon E-2124]. What are your thoughts? Cheers

 

[jgreco]

I'd say that the real problem is that manufacturers using AMD APU's are driven by price pressures to cut corners. It isn't clear that there are any problems with AMD's stuff.

However, the other angle is similar to one I've explained with regards to HBA's, NIC's, etc. We know that the LSI HBA 9211 with the right firmware works correctly, and we know that Intel 1G ethernets work correctly, because in aggregate, FreeNAS users have placed billions of run-hours on these without experiencing trouble. This is not to say that these are the only devices that *can* work 100.000% correctly. The problem is that if you get yourself a FooTek SuperAwesomeNIC which you plug in and seems to work great but has only been on the market one week, there's really no track record to know how well it will work in the long term. You're in the dozens of run-hours. It's unproven technology. It is absolutely possible for it to work just as well as an Intel, but it lacks the track record.

This same problem exists for mainboards, and to a lesser extent, CPU's. The farther you get out into the realm of "only a few people in the world run a configuration similar to this," the harder it is to know if there are sharp corners.

For things such as HBA's and NIC's, swapping in an add-on card is generally sufficient to remediate.

For the mainboard, it's a bit trickier. Especially if you want to do more complex server tricks such as virtualization, this tends to favor a true server board because the server manufacturers build for other customers who are also doing virt. It may be better to see if you can find a used server platform that's known to work well than it is to "off-road" with new AMD technology. You probably don't need the latest and greatest Xeon E-2124. The Intel CPU's have evolved very slowly over the last ~ten years and a 5 year old server has most of the same oomph as a modern one when you compare on a core-by-core basis. Something to think about at least.

 

[ChriZ]

The only issue with Intel is their consumer platforms do not support ECC memory, which is something I want to be able to have as an upgrade path in the future, and the cheapest Xeon from my local PC store is $350 (NZD) [Xeon E-2124]. What are your thoughts? Cheers

Well, you don't need a Xeon to get ECC support. Celerons, Pentiums and - most of the - i3s also support ECC