LSI SAS passthrough problems

TrueNAS General
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1

Greetings, all

I have been attempting to get a decommissioned Oracle Database Appliance (model X8-2L) reconfigured for use as a temporary landing zone for some unstructured data that we’re moving around in our environment.

I’m using a single host, dual connected to a DE3-24C ZFS storage shelf from a single ORCL-EXT-SAS3 (LSI 3008 7110119) HBA. Host OS is Windows Server 2022 Standard w/ Hyper V.

As expected, the host OS doesn’t see anything as far as the drives inside the array, but StorCLI64 does see the controllers, the array, and the drives themselves.

Here’s what I’ve done so far:

1. Made sure that the firmware for the HBA is in IT mode.

2. Updated the HBA firmware to latest revision from Broadcom

3. Disabled UEFI on the HBA in the system BIOS

4. Updated the Oracle system firmware for the host itself to the latest available version.

5. Installed TrueNAS Core as a Hyper V VM and tested successfully without attempting HBA passthrough.

6. Disabled HBA (Disable-PnpDevice) successfully. HBA’s no longer even appear in Device Manager

7. Dismounted the HBA from the host OS (Dismount-VMHostAssignableDevice) successfully

8. Assigned the HBA to the virtual machine (Add-VMAssignableDevice) successfully

9. Added the additional SCSI controller to the VM hardware with no drives attached.

TrueNAS boots up to a point, and fails with the dreaded “KDB: enter: panic:” error

I really thought I had this problem licked. I’ve done extensive googling on this and it seems like I’ve run through all of the possible gotchas, with no success. Any guidance ya’ll could provide on this would be greatly appreciated

2

Why, oh why???

My first suggestion would be to try bare metal. And, unfortunately, rather with CE 25.10 instead of CORE.
Also remove one of these two cables—unless you’re absolutely certain you are not doing double pathing.

3

Thanks @etorix!

i’m going to have one of my guys remove one of the cables for me, and see if that works. that’s a good tip… when i run storcli on the controllers, they show all of the drives twice. given the use case for the system having multi pathing really isn’t necessary.

if that fails i’ll try the CE bare metal option on the other host and see if it behaves better. The thought had occurred to me, but i was trying to exhaust my quickest option first, even though it’s clearly not ideal.

4

well, ok… i guess doing the bare metal installation is what i needed from the beginning. TrueNAS SCALE installation was quick and everything was totally PnP. i’m able to see all the disks and get in and create everything i needed to.

thank you!

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