FreeBSD, QLogic HBAs, and SAN

[anomie]

I'm going to have the opportunity to "sneak" FreeBSD on to a high-end server at work, and I would like to take full advantage.

The main requirements are: I need FreeBSD to play nice with my QLogic fibre channel HBAs (which appear to be supported via isp(4)), and I'd like to set up multipathing (which is discussed in this thread) for said HBA connections to the SAN.

Does anyone have experience with this or a very similar setup? Care to share your thoughts? I am planning to experiment with the FreeBSD 8 release for amd64 -- that arch simply because the server has a large amount of RAM.

 

[Sylgeist]

I actually would like to add something to this as I just setup something similar. I have a couple old IBM Xeon boxes with Qlogic cards. I have connected them to an IBM DS6800 and a no-name generic SATA array.

I have run into issues if I disable the SCSI Bios on the Qlogic cards. If I leave it enabled things work beautifully, but it overrides the local SCSI adapter for booting which is annoying on servers with local disks.

The multipath works well from my experience though!

 

[TimmerCA]

QLogic and Adaptec Conflicts?

I'm having that same problem now - if I enable the QLogic card, my box stops booting off the Adaptec RAID controller that handles the system disks. You said that you could somehow disable the QLogic BIOS, but I can't seem to figure out how to do that. Is there something you can point me to that shows me how to disable that BIOS?

And then I guess the second question is how can these two controllers live together peacefully? I have the Adaptec card connected to 16 internal 1TB disks, and the QLogic card I'd like to connect to an additional 12TB of external disks for a total of 28TB of storage. Do I need to let the QLogic drives be the boot drives? I don't see a way in the system BIOS to tell the server to boot off those disks - I don't think the system BIOS is fibre-channel aware.