Any luck with setting up Fibre Channel in Scale?

Hey everyone! I am looking to gather some input, as to experience configuring and using Fibre Channel in Scale. Personally I’ve had no luck, and run Core - because it just works!

Let me know what you think, and thanks in advance for your comments. Have a good one!

Klaus

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Adding drivers is not really supported in TrueNAS, Core or SCALE. Just because it worked in Core, does not mean that it is supported. Both are “firmware”, not general purpose OSes or Linux distros.

That said, you can probably enable developer mode and add support packages. Though the FC drivers may not be in the kernel for SCALE.

Have you checked if the FC card has a driver attached?
You can do it with lspci -v from root.

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Here we usually suggest sticking with hardware that’s known for working reliably.

I suggest you reading the 10 Gig Networking Primer | TrueNAS Community and giving us more info about your hardware.

Often the compatibility issue is not the system’s fault but manufacturers’ locks.

Hey @Davvo and @Arwen

I wanted to clear things up for this thread, that I’m not looking for troubleshooting of my environment. I am no longer working this problem, as I have a solid solution in TrueNAS Core and my efforts right now are focused upon Openshift/Openstack clusters :wink: I do however truly appreciate the responses, thanks!

Thus, I am seeking those individuals who have Fiber Channel working on TrueNAS Scale. I look forward to hearing from anyone who has this deployed and running at present.

Thanks again and enjoy the weekend!

Klaus

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Op,

You ever get any feedback or see anything other than above?

I have a FC core implementation and was thinking about spinning up a test scale to see if QLA FC and Mellanox IB would work…

…the two most notorious and unsupported methods! :slight_smile:

TN Enterprise reportedly supports Fibre Channel.

Sorry I never responded to this thread! I’ve recently purchased a Dell 8024 for $200 and will do multi-path entirely via iSCSI. This will allow me to make the change to Scale with ease, if so desired. One way of solving for it, I guess. Best of luck to you in all that you do!

FC support for Enterprise customers will be added in 25.04.

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Nice, and I would LOVE to run IX gear. Too bad its out of the question to purchase the enterprise box. Guess like others I need to roll my own, for affordability reasons.

Yeah, I’m also just a personal homelab user, so no enterprise support for me either. I’ve always just enabled the components in loader and gone without GUI features.

I have already seen that scale doesn’t like a QLE2460 (which is very old). I might have to see how painful it will be to get a driver (which breaks the appliance mentality).

Get a refurbished Ethernet NIC (Intel X520/540, Chelsio T520, Solarflare). It will be less painful, including on your wallet.

I already have a whole FC fabric, so that’s really cheaper on my wallet other than the watts the switch uses.

This response worries me because I’m not nor will I be an enterprise user since it’s a personal lab.

The middleware controls the SCST.conf file, so even if I CLI add the FC target and LUNs, the GUI will overwrite it.

TN core works fine with FC, just had to add loader tunable.

I think there still needs to be a way to use FC without a contract person use.

I feel you Cory! Home labs don’t typically have a large budget hehehe. However I can tell you that the Dell 8250 24 port 10g switches have come down a bit and usually can be found for around $200. Its still 4 times the cost of a brocade silkworm but it is faster on the plus side…

Best of luck in your usage of FC with IX systems free versions. I’m right here with you, still hanging on to my 4gb fiber in multipath usage :wink:

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