After doing some more digging, I’ve found it’s apparently possible to use MD1200 controllers in place of the MD3600x FC controllers, which I have no intention of taking full advantage of the fiber part since I’m really only looking at doing a single host config.
Now it’s more a matter of making sure it actually will work, and the getting the proper HBA/SAS controller (I don’t really know the difference)
Using the SAS cards instead of the FC controllers should be fine, but it will be a different beast. The MD3600 controllers are basically your RAID card and you use a SAS HBA to connect to it. The virtual disks are configured on the MD3600 and exposed as LUNs to the hosts over FC. If you put plain SAS controllers in the storage chassis instead, you are exposing all the bare drives to the host. That is how I would do it if I were in your shoes and then would just create ZFS arrays over those bare disks. If I were going to try and have multiple hosts using that storage then you would need to stick with the MD3600F.
An HBA (host bus adapter) is a SAS controller (or rather, has a SAS controller chip on it). You mostly just want to make sure that your host (the server) has enough physical PCIe lanes to use the whole card, otherwise you’ll get bottlenecked there. You also want to check whether you’ve got 6G SAS or 12G SAS capability. If your drives only support 6 gig, for example, there’s zero point in buying a 12G SAS card, which is actually nice because 6G cards are a lot cheaper. You do want to make sure you actually need an HBA and not a RAID controller though - they’re easily confused. Not sure if I actually answered anything there but I write
SAS firmware and use HBAs all the time, so feel free to ask me more and I’ll try to piece together a coherent answer.
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After doing some more digging, I’ve found it’s apparently possible to use MD1200 controllers in place of the MD3600x FC controllers, which I have no intention of taking full advantage of the fiber part since I’m really only looking at doing a single host config.
Now it’s more a matter of making sure it actually will work, and the getting the proper HBA/SAS controller (I don’t really know the difference)
Edit: Links to what I believe I’m referring to
Using the SAS cards instead of the FC controllers should be fine, but it will be a different beast. The MD3600 controllers are basically your RAID card and you use a SAS HBA to connect to it. The virtual disks are configured on the MD3600 and exposed as LUNs to the hosts over FC. If you put plain SAS controllers in the storage chassis instead, you are exposing all the bare drives to the host. That is how I would do it if I were in your shoes and then would just create ZFS arrays over those bare disks. If I were going to try and have multiple hosts using that storage then you would need to stick with the MD3600F.
An HBA (host bus adapter) is a SAS controller (or rather, has a SAS controller chip on it). You mostly just want to make sure that your host (the server) has enough physical PCIe lanes to use the whole card, otherwise you’ll get bottlenecked there. You also want to check whether you’ve got 6G SAS or 12G SAS capability. If your drives only support 6 gig, for example, there’s zero point in buying a 12G SAS card, which is actually nice because 6G cards are a lot cheaper. You do want to make sure you actually need an HBA and not a RAID controller though - they’re easily confused. Not sure if I actually answered anything there but I write SAS firmware and use HBAs all the time, so feel free to ask me more and I’ll try to piece together a coherent answer.