Migration from Core to Scale, and my "ISP2432-based 4Gb Fibre Channel" cards

TrueNAS General
,
1

Having transitioned from ??NAS?? → FreeNAS → TrueNAS Core, and now TrueNAS Scale, and having kept my “ISP2432-based 4Gb Fibre Channel” cards installed in Core that worked seemlessly with VMware, I have now realised that although the card is active, and showing online in Scale, there is no way to make it work like it used to be with Core.

So my question is will it work at some point in the future, or do I have to revert using Core.
I would prefer to stick with Scale as it’s new Docker and VM features are pretty awesome…

2

Fibre Channel on CORE was not marketed or supported. It was an Enterprise feature. Some people found workarounds… I assume you did as well.

SCALE does not have FC support yet. The Enterprise version will in 2025, but I can’t guarantee the workaround in the Community version will be easy.

My recommendation is transition to iSCSI… it works seamlessly with VMware and is supported in both Community and Enterprise versions.

Ironically, Broadcom owns both Brocade and VMware and is turning them into cash cows… not providing free versions for home labbers. The Community is too small to self-support and we can’t afford to support for free.

If you really want FC for production, please contact IX.

1 Like
3

I did not know that about Core and FC.
I am actually moving away from Vmware to Proxmox, but thank you for your informative response.
I shall ponder on my way forward.
Thanks again…

1 Like
4

FC works with scale, but not really.

You can CLI the scstadmin, but like they always say, it’s not supported.

More importantly, the scstadmin.conf file get overwritten by middleware, so if you change iscsi, you’ll lose FC config.

Here’s how I enabled it for testing:

I wanted scst driver

cat > /etc/rc.conf.d/modules << EOF
rc_conf_blacklist="qla2xxx"
module_load="qla2xxx_scst qla2x00tgt"
EOF

Tunable to load SCST QLA driver
Type: loader
Variable: module_load
Value: qla2xxx_scst

Tunable to load SCST QLA target driver
Type: loader
Variable: module_load
Value: qla2x00tgt

Create SCST configuration:

Create and enable first FC target port

scstadmin -add_target 21:00:00:1b:32:0e:0a:96 -driver qla2x00t -rel_tgt_id 11
scstadmin -enable_target 21:00:00:1b:32:0e:0a:96 -driver qla2x00t

Create and enable second FC target port

scstadmin -add_target 21:01:00:1b:32:2e:0a:96 -driver qla2x00t -rel_tgt_id 12
scstadmin -enable_target 21:01:00:1b:32:2e:0a:96 -driver qla2x00t

Associate LUNs

scstadmin -add_lun 1 -driver qla2x00t -target 21:00:00:1b:32:0e:0a:96 -device extent_1
scstadmin -add_lun 1 -driver qla2x00t -target 21:01:00:1b:32:2e:0a:96 -device extent_1
5

Apologies for the late response, but in the end I just removed the fibre card and bonded 3 of my nics together which gives me →

Media Type:Ethernet
Media Subtype:3000Mb/s

which is more that enough for my lab.

1 Like