HP GEN8

RTO-IT

Does 2.1 support HP GEN8 servers well?

SeventhSon

Check the Compatibility list for FreeBSD 8.3 I'd say

ChristianHaag

Most likely it is too late for an answer to the original poster…for you guys stumbling over the Google hit like me, here is the answer:

No.

(That's it…Ok, a bit more information)

Our HP Gen8 Servers bought in November 2012 were not compatible. The Smart Array P420i controller would not become a friend of pfSense/FreeBSD. Not even an error message, just an uncommunicative ingnore.

Great that the Gen8 have 4 network plugs, no longer messing around with internal cards. We know this from the "7" HP series as well. A new feature is that all 4 are not recognized.

After reading this comment

http://serverfault.com/questions/338666/is-there-danger-to-virtualizing-a-router

written by a guy most people in this forum know, I decided to throw the rule "never virtualize a firewall" over board and just did it. Now running perfectly on a HP Gen8 since a month....

Chris

ChristianHaag

Two more hints for the lazy googlers:

Configuring network Interfaces in vSphere Client

See http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/PfSense_2_on_VMware_ESXi_5

VMware Tools Installation

Install the package "Open-VM-Tools-8.8.1". Instantly worked under VMware ESXi 5.1

msi

Hi Christian
Interesting, looking at 8.3-RELEASE source, a commit in February 2012 MFC'ed new Smart Array Gen8 support into 8.3:


Date:   Sun Feb 5 19:10:48 2012 +0000

    MFC r230313, r230316, r230323, r230588

    Support new raid controllers

Interestingly sys/dev/ciss.c contains the PCI ID for this controller (added in this exact commit):


ciss_vendor_data[] = {
[...]
    { 0x103C, 0x3354, CISS_BOARD_SA5,   "HP Smart Array P420i" },
[...]

Depending on the modular network cards these servers have, the problem may be the Broadcom NIC yet.
I guess you'll stay on ESX for now, but would you be willing to boot some vanilla FreeBSD 8.3 and 9.1 to see if
Smart Array and (likely) NICs behave differently and what exact models they are?
(pciconf -lvb and some grep might be of help)