Hello everyone,
I'm quite new and green to Infiniband technology.
Setting up a lab environment at home, and before I run out and buy things, I need to make sure that it's going to work as I would like it to.
I've basically got a HP N40L Microserver (Running ZFS under FreeBSD) which will be acting as a Storage Array for my VMware ESXi v5.1 hypervisor. This question is in regards to ESXi compatibility for the ConnectX series of cards, namely the MHGH28-XTC card. I would like the Infiniband HCA to present itself as a vmhba to the hypervisor so I can use the SCSI RDMA Protocol (SRP) to access the ZFS datastores on the HP Microserver.
I've read the Mellanox InfiniBand OFED Driver for VMware User Manual (v1.8.1) which seems to detail exactly what I want to do under the "Driver Features" section of the document. My concern is namely around the compatibility of the MHGH28-XTC for SRP under VMware ESXi v5.1.
The VMware Driver Compatibility Matrix lists the ConnectX series of cards as "incompatible" under the OFED Drivers section.
Mellanox Technologies: VMware: Firmware - Driver Compatibility Matrix
In addition to that, looking through the release notes for the Infiniband OFED Driver, I can see that there is SRP support added, but the ConnectX cards are not listed as a supported HCA, only the ConnectX-2 and ConnectX-3.
Given that I want this for fast storage access, as well as a learning and development exercise for now and time to come, I'm getting the feeling that the ConnectX line of cards may not be suitable and I should be trying to source the ConnectX-2 series of cards. Unfortunately, these are a fair bit more expensive.
Your thoughts would be appreciated.
Thanks.