Topic: Chelsio 10G NIC

[DanB35]

I'm looking to upgrade my SME server and FreeNAS box with 10G NICs.  Chelsio seems to be pretty well-supported under FreeNAS, and is widely available and inexpensive.  I can't find a HCL for CentOS 6, though--the most recent I can find on their web site is for CentOS 5, two major releases out of date.  In particular, I'm looking at the S310E-CR.  How would I determine if this is supported by CentOS6/SME, other than buying one, plugging it in, and crossing my fingers?

[Stefano]

which chipset does it use?

anyway, take a look here:
http://www.redhat.com/promo/summit/2008/downloads/pdf/Thursday/Mark_Wagner.pdf

I'd add that going to intel chipset based nic is always the best choice

[DanB35]

It's my understanding that Chelsio makes their own chipsets; this card uses their T3 chipset.  I know that at the GigE level and below, Intel chipsets work very well and are widely (and inexpensively) available.  At 10G, reports from the FreeNAS folks suggest that Chelsio is better supported than Intel.  Obviously FreeBSD and Linux are different, but I haven't often seen a case where FreeBSD has better hardware support than Linux.

There's also the fact that the Intel cards are significantly more expensive--I'm seeing that Chelsio card for $30-35, while an Intel card is $200+.

Digging a bit more, Chelsio has Linux drivers available for download.  The driver name appears to be cxgb3, and I do see /lib/modules/2.6.32-573.7.1.el6.x86_64/kernel/drivers/net/cxgb3 on my SME system.  Seems like a promising sign.  There also appears to be a cxgb4 module, which would presumably support the T4 cards.

[Stefano]

if you open the link I gave you in my last post, you'll see that Centos (hence SME) supports 10Gbit nic since release 4..

if you see the driver, I'm quite sure that it will work out of the box, without the need of an external driver at all

[DanB35]

I opened the link, and saw support for some 10G NICs.  Didn't really answer the question of whether this NIC was supported, though the mention of Chelsio was a good sign.  And yes, finding the driver is also a pretty good sign.

Is there really not a HCL for the last two major releases of CentOS?  That seems like kind of a fail for something that's billed as an enterprise OS.

Anyway, thanks for the help.  I'm reasonably confident that this card will work.  I'm not so concerned about a $35 used NIC that might not work, but the $300+ switch that will be worthless without the working NIC is a bit more of an issue.

[DanB35]

Well, picked up a Dell PowerConnect 5524 switch for $200, and it has two SFP+ ports on it.  A S310E-CR for $25, and a SFP+ patch cable for $10 round out the package.  I should have them by the end of this week, so hopefully I'll be able to report back shortly how well this card actually works with SME 9.

My existing GigE switch has some dead ports on it, so I was figuring it was time to replace it anyway.  I'm hoping this will give better bandwidth to my FreeNAS server, which is what I back up the SME server to (I have a second card and patch cable on the way for the FreeNAS box).  It should help out the rest of the network as well, I expect, though that isn't really bandwidth-limited in most cases.

[CharlieBrady]

Is there really not a HCL for the last two major releases of CentOS?  That seems like kind of a fail for something that's billed as an enterprise OS.

Look for information about Red Hat Enterprise Linux, rather than CentOS, which is just a rebuild of the same source code.

[DanB35]

Received one Chelsio NIC yesterday, out of the two I'd ordered.  I'd received the twinax patch cable and the switch a few days ago, so I installed the card this morning.  As suggested, it was automatically recognized by the config wizard, and once the server was configured to use that interface, everything came up like it should.

Since I don't have the card for the FreeNAS server yet, I can't give any performance results, but at a minimum I can say that it works.