Evening all,
I have a DL380p Gen8 running server 2022 on the bare metal and have been tooling around with DDA in Hyper-V. So far so good, having passed a GPU to my Plex VM for hardware transcoding.
I’ve now added a LSI9211-8i based HBA to connect to a second 8 bay enclosure with the intention of using DDA to pass it to a VM running TrueNAS Core in order to give ZFS direct access to the attached drives, but I’m stuck at the following issue.
BIOS requires that this device remain attached to BIOS-owned memory. Not assignable.
How on earth do I get around this? The HBA is firmware flashed into IT mode, and I even forwent flashing the bios stuff back to the card. only the IT mode firmware. So nothing now shows up on server boot, just skips right past it.
Is there something I can do in the server bios to have it just ignore the card but not outright disable it or is this built into the card’s firmware and I’m S-O-L ?
Been googling this for a couple of hours and I have found lots of people that have passed HBA’s through to VM’s but no information on what specific hardware. And nothing on how to address my issue, if it is even possible.
Happy to go and purchase another HBA if this one is not useable for this config, but don’t have a lot of leads on which cards would work.
Is it also possible this is a Legacy Bios limitation? These servers didn’t go UEFI until gen 9 I believe, so UEFI is not an option on a gen 8. Although my server is as up to date as it can be with all the latest available firmware’s and BIOS.
Appreciate any suggestions and insights you might have. Or even recommendations on a HBA that has the right modes for ZFS and support PCIe passthrough with DDA.