from existing posts (~2020) I understand TrueNAS doesn’t intend to support FC cards. And I guess this hasn’t changed with Scale.
I simply have a chance to use 10Gb SFP+ NIC that was included in a DELL R640 I bought on the second hand market. I think it’s not supported on TrueNAS (it isn’t on Proxmox).
Knowing that TrueNAS host system can’t be modified, at least not via apt AFAIK, I’m guessing there must be no way to add hardware drivers manually?
You can after enabling dev-mode.
thanks, good to know.
What will you put on the other end?
Make your life easier and get (supported) Ethernet SFP+ cards. There are very cheap ones out there.
Bad omen…
We’re adding Enterprise feature for being an FC target in 25.04. I don’t the list of specific cards on hand.
Sounds like a deep shift since QLogic QLE2462 not working in modern TrueNAS | TrueNAS Community
I’m not sure why Free/TrueNAS would shy away from supporting these cards as it seems to make sense for a NAS/SAN provider to support all available network options. It must have been hard to achieve up to now I suppose, especially as an open source solution base don generic BSD/Linux.
We’re adding Enterprise feature for being an FC target in 25.04.
Could you elaborate on this or point out some doc reference?
Enterprise feature? How is that different from a simple feature?
FC target? meaning some additional work besides including hardware drivers?
As I said, I got it with an R640 which I want to use as an hypervisor, and use TN as the SAN/NAS storage provider (new instance will be on a Dell R730XD)
I only wanted to assess whether I could use it on a spare (backup?) future TN instance.
The plan is to replace Proxmox with XCP-NG, which has the driver for QLE2692 AFAICT.
I can’t figure a way to sync Xen Orchestra Metadata Backup (VM config only backup) with a TN snapshot yet though.
I’m not sure how hypervisor provider backup features are supposed to work with SAN storage, which they naturally support. It seems to me that they should have a mode to trigger remote snapshots for this.
Proxmox has ZFS over iSCSI, which seems to be just that (and a possibility to implement it for a TN, done here
Xen Orchestra doesn’t seem to have anything, but a web-hooks plugin that would allow a TN API call implementation.
But what other FibreChannel NIC do you have?
On CORE/FreeBSD Fibre Channel support has existed for a long time, it was just only available on first party hardware. There’s unsupported ways of making it work Fibre Channel on FreeNAS 11.1u4 | TrueNAS Community
A Chelsio T580-LP-CR that I have added.
That is an ethernet card not a FC card.
I see, I apologize for my confusion, I simply saw it had SFP+ ports and assumed it was Ethernet.
I meant FC card as in “using Fiber Channel” card, with SFP+ as opposed to RJ45 ports, not as a protocol.
I do not intend to use FC protocol.
TrueNAS of all flavors has always supported ethernet cards with SFP+ modules.
QLE2692 is a Fibre channel card not an ethernet card.
Yeah my bad, I’ve read enough about FC to know I don’t need it and don’t want to do it. It was simply out of my scope and I didn’t expect the card could be an FC one.
@awalkerix’s “We’re adding Enterprise feature for being an FC target in 25.0” makes total sense now. Glad TN will be able to support being an FC target.
Apologies again for my confiusion
Do note that Enterprise Version is not the “Community” aka Free Version.
I wasn’t sure actually, so there actually is a specific code base for Enterprise!
