ISCSI hardware offloading with be2iscsi

[mickmortensen]

Hi all,

My organisation is looking to move our vmware Vspere setup to proxmox.
For this reason we have conducted some tests on some of our servers and tried to configure everything as it is in out current vmware setup. One of those things are ISCSI with hardware offloading which i can't seem to get to work on our HP C7000 enclosure with BL-460C G8 Blades.

We would like to get support subscription on the setup, but we don't want to buy the subscription unless hardware offloading is something we can get to work.
Anyone here who have gotten ISCSI to work with HBA interfaces and the be2iscsi driver, or if there is staff that can help us getting it to work if we get support subsciption on our setup.

Running the iscsiadm -m iface detects the interfaces with the correct mac addresses and everything.
Iface config:

# BEGIN RECORD 2.0-874
iface.iscsi_ifacename = be2iscsi.b4:b5:2f:6e:80:29.ipv4.0
iface.hwaddress = b4:b5:2f:6e:80:29
iface.transport_name = be2iscsi
iface.initiatorname = iqn.1990-07.com.emulex:b4-b5-2f-6e-80-29
iface.vlan_id = 65535
iface.vlan_priority = 255
iface.iface_num = 0
iface.mtu = 0
iface.port = 0
iface.tos = 0
iface.ttl = 0
iface.tcp_wsf = 0
iface.tcp_timer_scale = 0
iface.def_task_mgmt_timeout = 0
iface.erl = 0
iface.max_receive_data_len = 0
iface.first_burst_len = 0
iface.max_outstanding_r2t = 0
iface.max_burst_len = 0
# END RECORD

# BEGIN RECORD 2.0-874
iface.iscsi_ifacename = be2iscsi.b4:b5:2f:6e:80:2d.ipv4.0
iface.hwaddress = b4:b5:2f:6e:80:2d
iface.transport_name = be2iscsi
iface.initiatorname = iqn.1990-07.com.emulex:b4-b5-2f-6e-80-29
iface.vlan_id = 65535
iface.vlan_priority = 255
iface.iface_num = 0
iface.mtu = 0
iface.port = 0
iface.tos = 0
iface.ttl = 0
iface.tcp_wsf = 0
iface.tcp_timer_scale = 0
iface.def_task_mgmt_timeout = 0
iface.erl = 0
iface.max_receive_data_len = 0
iface.first_burst_len = 0
iface.max_outstanding_r2t = 0
iface.max_burst_len = 0
# END RECORD

 

[Stoiko Ivanov]

For this reason we have conducted some tests on some of our servers and tried to configure everything as it is in out current vmware setup. One of those things are ISCSI with hardware offloading which i can't seem to get to work on our HP C7000 enclosure with BL-460C G8 Blades.

Why do you need iSCSI hardware offloading? - in my experience enabling offloading does not help performance too much in most setups, while it does cause a far tighter coupling between used hardware, the installed firmware-level on that hardware, and the currently running kernel.

However I never had that particular hardware setup - so it's more a question of curiosity (and a slight suggestion to try with regular iSCSI first)

We would like to get support subscription on the setup, but we don't want to buy the subscription unless hardware offloading is something we can get to work.

While we cannot guarantee that a particular setup and hardware will work with any given version of PVE (see above, firmware issues can happen, despite the setup working fine with a different kernel version) - we usually do offer some initial pre-sales support via our Enterprise support portal (within reasonable boundaries)

I hope this helps!

 

[softworx]

Hi, I realize this is an old thread, but I'm curious if you were able to get it working. I am trying to get 8.1 working on some HP blades with be2iscsi interfaces.

I just went through and got a blade installed with proxmox 8.1 and multipath, but ran into issues actually using the iscsi LUNs within proxmox. The iscsi option does not properly enumerate available luns from the offloaded iscsi.

Using iscsi with a pure tcp iscsi setup on a lab setup works just fine, but if in an environment where iscsi is running on offloaded hbas, with iscsi data and regular network data isolated from each other, does not seem to be an option.

I opened a feature request (https://bugzilla.proxmox.com/show_bug.cgi?id=5114) to address this. In my research I found where openstack mentioned specifying interface for offloaded iscsi, but proxmox does not have that option, so I'm concerned this is going to be a non-starter.

I was wondering what you ended up doing, if you got it to work, and what your results were.

Thanks,
Greg

Hi all,

My organisation is looking to move our vmware Vspere setup to proxmox.
For this reason we have conducted some tests on some of our servers and tried to configure everything as it is in out current vmware setup. One of those things are ISCSI with hardware offloading which i can't seem to get to work on our HP C7000 enclosure with BL-460C G8 Blades.

We would like to get support subscription on the setup, but we don't want to buy the subscription unless hardware offloading is something we can get to work.
Anyone here who have gotten ISCSI to work with HBA interfaces and the be2iscsi driver, or if there is staff that can help us getting it to work if we get support subsciption on our setup.

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