Dell R740xd and Free/TrueNAS (technically, PERC H740P) & PCI-e pass-through

[bsodmike]

Hi all,

I’m posted here to find out if anyone has succeeded in getting PCI-e Pass-through (Direct I/O) working on a Dell PowerEdge server?

There are two approaches here of course,

1. Installing and running Free/TrueNAS as the primary OS.

2. Running Free/TrueNAS as a VM on a hypervisor such as XenServer.

With option (1) the only challenge is the PERC RAID controller, and working around it, as ideally we need to pass the disks through to the host as directly as possible (JBOD for example) or LSI SAS controllers in firmware IT mode. This is relatively easy enough.

Some online discussions talk about using older Dell controllers like the H730 (for JBOD), or H740P’s eHBA mode (not sure, untested by me). or H330 cards (untested).

Option 2:
This is where things get interesting and tricky.

Thoughts?

[Matthew_Bone]

Hello, did you get anywhere with this? I am trying to get the PERC h740P controller to work with truenas, and am not having any luck. It doesn’t appear to matter if I use the eHBA mode either. Any help would be appreciated.

[bsodmike]

Sorry no, I never got a chance to make progress on this.