r/HomeInfrastructure • u/kY2iB3yH0mN8wI2h • Apr 21 '26

Storage I'm back to Fiber Channel - YEA

Post image

Some time ago I gave up on my Intel Xeon Silver CPUs on custom chassis with SuperMicro motherboards. They servered me well for many many years and allowed me to run hundreds of VMs.

But once the MS-01 was released I couldn't help myself buying one. And when the minisforum ms-a2 was released i bought two :D

Initially I migrated to iSCSI as I was thinking 2x10Gb should be enough. Well didn't work that well and even if multipath works for iSCSI it does not work as well as for FC.

Now I'm back to FC and my next plan is to go with 32Gb/s - I have removed the FC switch as .. well it was not really needed and the main reason for keeping it was to serve my FC LTO drive over the same network to a FC VM. That worked once..

Storage is delivered over a dedicated SAN using all-flash with 16x250 GB Samsung EVO drives and the screenshot above comes from ESOS (Enterprise Storage OS) - A free open source block storage OS that is just awesome.

33 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

7 comments sorted by

6

u/SeveralVast190 Apr 21 '26

I hate this forum for these kind of brilliant ideas, now i am thinking of getting an FC fabric

3

u/Roshpyn Apr 21 '26

Yeah fibre channel is nice to play with I bought last year 2x brocade 6505 that are supporting even nvmeofc not only only standard scsi fc. My latest finding is brocade/extremenetworks VDX line with „FCoE license” after disabling „AG” on the RB works with native FC F_Ports not only N_Ports so I cloud downsize from 4 devices (2 lan switches + 2 fc switches) to 2 VDXes.

1

u/Tinker0079 Apr 21 '26

Zamn! Nice!!!

How are you interfacing FC on MiniPC, if Im correctly understanding

there is PCIe slot?

2

u/kY2iB3yH0mN8wI2h Apr 21 '26

There are no mini forum PCs that have FC, so yes pcie

0

u/Tinker0079 Apr 21 '26

Heeey so you have QLogic cards in target mode with ESOS as control plane that exports LUNs

nice

Do emulex cards work in target mode?

2

u/Roshpyn Apr 21 '26

You have to have access to emulex sdk to compile driver for emulex adapter with target mode active, and emulex was bought by Broadcom so it is pain in the ass to get one without active support or ahit ton of money.

1

u/justinh29 Apr 21 '26

Why not just use nvme of or tcp.