Greetings,
I am having a problem in my home lab setup and I hope someone might be able to help.
I have an esxi 8 system with an LSI 9300-16i HBA and a few HDDs on it. The esxi disks (boot and VMs/datastores) are NVME on the motherboard slots.
I would like to set up a TrueNAS Core vm, with the HBA in passthrough obviously. While this works at first, any time a disk operation takes place on the HDDs connected to the HBA (disk wipe, pool creation, etc.) the vm crashes and reboots.
I tried with OpenMediaVault and even Windows Server VMs, same results (the vm crashes).
As a test I installed TrueNAS on bare metal (on the exact same h/w obviously), and everything works perfectly, I created pools etc., no issues whatsoever. I also did a memtest, no errors detected. I also tested with Proxmox and a TrueNAS vm, all worked as expected. It's obvious that the problem is on how esxi passes the HBA to the VM, and there is no hardware or cabling error.
The HBA is in IT mode, with what I believe is the latest firmware available for it (16.00.12.00).
Below I have isolated some error messages:
- At the time the TrueNAS vm boots:
truenas Unable to find firmware file with prefix 'mpr_SAS9300-16i'
mpr0: IOC Fault 0x40002622, Resetting
mpr0: Reinitializing controller
panic: mpr_iocfacts_allocate failed to get IOC Facts with error 16
- At the time the vm crashes:
tn1 db_trace_self_wrapper() at db_trace_self_wrapper+0x2b/frame 0xfffffe0114762b10
tn1 vpanic() at vpanic+0x17f/frame 0xfffffe0114762b60
tn1 panic() at panic+0x43/frame 0xfffffe0114762bc0
tn1 mpr_iocfacts_allocate() at mpr_iocfacts_allocate+0x18bd/frame 0xfffffe0114762d30
tn1 mpr_reinit() at mpr_reinit+0x14c/frame 0xfffffe0114762d80
tn1 mpr_periodic() at mpr_periodic+0x96/frame 0xfffffe0114762da0
NONE of the above errors appear on the bare metal installation or in Proxmox (once again, on the exact same hardware).
I have spent weeks troubleshooting (web search, ChatGPT, you name it) but no luck so far. It would be great if anyone could advise as I would not like to switch to Proxmox.
Here is my setup (consumer-grade h/w, this being a home lab):
MSI MAG Z590 Torpedo
Intel Core i5-11400T, 6C/12T, 1.30-3.70GHz
128GB RAM
LSI 9300-16i
Thanks