Support plans related to RoCE in storage protocols (iSER, NVMe-oF, SMB Direct, NFSoRDMA)

[corycandia]

Edit: TL/DR good reason is at the bottom.

I would take you up on the tester license. I’m not that smart, but I already implemented RDMA and iSER using scstadmin, Connectx-3, with a Debian initiator, I just can’t use the GUI or else it overwrites the scst.conf and I lose the FC target config.

Now, I will feel smart if I can make iSER work with my ESXi version, lol. Try having no vendor support there.
I do this stuff for the fun and glory of learning how.

I don’t expect any IX systems direct support on enterprise features, nor am I advocating for all of the Enterprise features (that businesses should pay for) to be available freely in a manner that lets them circumvent paying for the r&d it takes to implement solid products. I’m just on an eBay budget.

Heck, as you pointed out, modern hardware can beat these things we’re taking about all day long. I still use 4gb FC, ConnectX-3, and HP Gen 8, cause that’s real businesses trash on eBay, which I love to buy

Anyway, I’m still planning to migrate from Core to Scale so I can maybe switch from FC to iSER for a little while.

Sign me up for your NFR/Test license though!?

Also, seconding the use case Rand mentioned. For me also, TN being shared storage for hypervisor (s) like VMware until I finally stop clinging to the past and just get on Proxmox, using old hardware for education and testing.

An actually good reason: RDMA seems to be becoming hugely important to the industry and we’ll need to be up on how losses networks work.

Also @Rand , I wish I had some of that NMVe money

[DFUguy]

@Captain_Morgan

Do you have 100Gbe RDMA-capable NICs (trueNAS and Clients) and a ROCE-capable switch?
RDMA aint cheap to get value out of it…

100Gbe NICs and RoCE capable switches are becoming quite affordable. Mikrotik just enabled RoCE support on their switches and there are plenty of capable NICs our there for cheap.

@kris

If there is enough interest for access to these features under some paid license option, we’re happy to gauge that interest and see if that makes sense under some program at a later date.

I think there is an appetite for a paid license for enterprise features. Many organizations like the one I work for have a list of approved hardware vendors and iX systems isn’t on it. A software license on the other hand is very doable.

[Captain_Morgan]

@DFUguy

I think there is an appetite for a paid license for enterprise features. Many organizations like the one I work for have a list of approved hardware vendors and iX systems isn’t on it. A software license on the other hand is very doable.

Thanks for the description of the problem. I do think we will need to provide hardware if HA and enterprise-grade support is required. Please ask them to approve us