Bridging network interfaces for iSCSI share

[Nashable]

Hello All,

This is my first post. I have been playing around with FreeNAS for about 6 months and in the last month decided to put in into my production environment.

First to say, FreeNAS rocks. It works great and am glad I decided to try it in our testing environment.

I have read everywhere I can about this and the only thing I can find on the forums is "use a switch instead of a software bridge". I did find one solution here but it didn't work, it was based on FreeNAS 8.3.1.

Here is my setup:
3 x Proxmox Virtual Environments each with:
- 2 Intel GB dual port NICs (1 port each to general network and 1 port each to iSCSI on FreeNAS) double cards for redundancy.
- VMs served from iSCSI using ZFS on FreeNAS.
- ISOs and Backup from NFS on FreeNAS.
FreeNAS server with:
- 2 x Intel GB quad port NICs (1 port each to general network and 3 ports each as dedicated iSCSI to each Proxmox Server) double cards for redundancy.

I would like to create a bridge of 6 ports on FreeNAS (3 ports from each card) to send/receive iSCSI data @ 10.10.0.100.

Right now I have everything working but with a single port for iSCSI connected to a single Proxmox Server. I thought to setup each of the 6 ports with a different IP but they cannot be in the same subnet (from what I can tell) so I used 10.10.0.100, 10.11.0.100, etc.

Proxmox will not work this way to move VMs from one Proxmox Server to another in the same cluster, it needs to have the same iSCSI target information for all servers. On the 2nd Proxmox server it cannot reach iSCSI at the same IP so it shows the shared storage is offline.

A solution is to use a GB switch. However, I like direct physical connections especially for shared storage. This eliminates the need for extra hardware to fail.

I hope I am missing something that allows this feature. I am pretty green on FreeBSD and more of a CentOS user.

Thanks for taking the time to read my ramblings,
NAShable

 

[Zedicus]

the only solution i could think of would be to utilize Open vSwitch on the proxmox hosts. you will still end up managing a switch but it would not be a physical device. you would have to bind physical ports to the vswitch also to get the other hosts and or iscsi targets connections in place. you will also probably need to add some more NICS to one of the hosts as the host that has the vswitch running will be controlling all traffic.

theres also a way of doing a clustered vswitch that might allow you to keep outbound traffic from having to pass through a single host, but my knowledge of that scenario is limited.

 

[hlmtre]

This is probably a dead thread, but I found this on my way to finding a solution. You'll need to bridge the two interfaces, then have iscsi listen on 0.0.0.0 (all addresses). On FreeBSD this is simple, but FreeNAS reloads itself r/o from boot, so you can't just edit rc.conf or interfaces. You'll have to add a set of tunables.

https://bugs.freenas.org/issues/9591#note-6

There is where I found what led me in the right direction. My tunables look like this:

 

[ZiggyGT]

I get a dead link trying to follow this thread. I really like to understand how to set up a bridge in FREENAS. I want to connect to multiple host with 2-Dual port 10Gb Mellanox -X2 ethernet cards. I have assemble the hardware and included this script but I don't see that a bridge was created or how to configure it. Client are Windows 10 machines

Script looks like this:
ifconfig bridge create
ifconfig bridge0 addm cxgb0 addm cxgb1 up addm cxgb2 addm cxgb3
ifconfig cxgb0 up
ifconfig cxgb1 up
ifconfig cxgb2 up
ifconfig cxgb3 up
ifconfig bridge0 inet 192.168.200.1/24
ifconfig cxgb0 mtu 9000
ifconfig cxgb1 mtu 9000
ifconfig cxgb2 mtu 9000
ifconfig cxgb3 mtu 9000
ifconfig bridge0 mtu 9000

directorepsilon provided this info
https://www.reddit.com/r/freenas/comments/7x5p3u/bridging_freenas_to_two_esxi_servers/

I hope to have my network config similar to this
https://www.jonkensy.com/diy-sannas...e-with-freenas-and-switchless-10-gbps-part-2/


I would appreciate any help you could provide