Hyper-v and SR-IOV in OpnSense support?

[bandit8623]

I do not think I confused anything: I wrote "HBA raid adapters" (should have written "raid HBAs") and meant Areca ARC1280, which are in fact raid host bus adapters. And I can assure you will have a hard time replacing those with software or other brand adapters.

They worked fine at their time, but time moves on and ZFS has merits way beyond RAID, namely compression, checksumming and snapshots, plus the capability to work across OSes and HBA brands.

Especially the checksumming feature is really important: I once had one HDD that wrote defective data without telling. It seemed like it had a defective RAM buffer. In case you did not know: classic RAID does not help with that, while ZFS does! It also helps with nowadays huge drives, where errors can also statistically go unnoticed in the disk itself.

i work in the used refurb server market and havent ever seen one of those...  so bad choice of a riad card.
microsemi or lsi are the 2 main players

[bandit8623]

We dropped hardware RAID between 2009 (FreeBSD 8) and 2012 (FreeBSD 9). Not looking back. I run >100 physical machines in 5 data centres, all with ZFS.

im sure it works well,  but its not always the best way for everyone. Clearly you are skilled in linux and thats why it works well for you.
I persoanlly manage windows domains and sticking with hyper-v is the easiest way to do that.

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Clearly you are skilled in linux and thats why it works well for you.

I am not. I am skilled in FreeBSD. :-)

[meyergru]

i work in the used refurb server market and havent ever seen one of those...  so bad choice of a riad card.
microsemi or lsi are the 2 main players

I now all that, my very young padawan ;-) - I bought them ~2000 and used them for > 20 years. Beat that longevity with your LSI specimens...

The only reason I entered ZFS later than Patrick is, because I actually am a Linux expert and the Linux adoption of ZFS was way later than with *BSD. Speaking of this: If your LSI and Broadcom adapters are badly supported under Linux, then those are probably a bad choice...

[bandit8623]

i work in the used refurb server market and havent ever seen one of those...  so bad choice of a riad card.
microsemi or lsi are the 2 main players

I now all that, my very young padawan ;-) - I bought them ~2000 and used them for > 20 years. Beat that longevity with your LSI specimens...

The only reason I entered ZFS later than Patrick is, because I actually am a Linux expert and the Linux adoption of ZFS was way later than with *BSD. Speaking of this: If your LSI and Broadcom adapters are badly supported under Linux, then those are probably a bad choice...

you are correct thats why im using hyper-v :)  although i think there is quite good linux driver support for broadcom.  its just that most dont use hardware raid on linux.

[cookiemonster]

I've experienced this from a previous job. I was on the operations area but application-side. Sitting alongside the infra chaps. It was a Wintel land mostly although not entirely.
We had thousands of physical servers (not exaggerating) across multiple data centres. Now, Wintel-world, the Infra chaps were ordering and racking servers and came in mostly 1U or 2U, and the default configuration came with raid cards for the OS. Most data on SANs.

They loved the fact that a failed disk meant only replacing a disk, getting the card to rebuild the array and no downtime. But the parts they loved the most were a) if any of this failed, they could go to the vendor, put a ticket and get an engineer to replace and was a vendor problem; b) by operating this way, our Infra chaps didn't have to learn *nix ways. Things were simple, no need to know the intricacies of how, just replace parts.
Unfortunately this extended to most everything else. They were and still are, Wintel people. They will only work with clickware. Black screens to type commands, no thank you. Then they will only work with Windows server OS, Hyper-V for Virtualisation (yikes!) and then if something doesn't work with their clicks, they're stuffed. They had to be bought VMWare toys.

I'm not sure they can be helped much.