I’m looking for a solution to connect some SAS disks to my HP dl380g9 to use with ZFS. I understand that HW RAID with ZFS is a big no-no and that a HBA in IT mode is the best solution as that is passing the disks through to the OS as-is.

Some cards can only be put into an HBA mode which also presents the disks to the OS individually, but it is not a true pass through, as far is I understood. It should be a lot better than HW Raid, though.

Picking up such a card would be the simplest solution for me. P440ar cards are available for dirt cheap, don’t require a PCI slot and I can re-use the existing SAS cables without worrying that whatever a non HP card uses does not plug into into the backplane of the HP dl380g9.

Is HBA mode fine for ZFS? Or should I make sure to pick up an LSI card that supports the true IT mode?

I’m new to netbox and as far as I can tell there are two ways to combine Netbox with ansible.

• Automate network and Netbox with ansible. A playbook would configure a switch port and then use the Netbox ansible collection to modify Netbox to reflect the change. All changes go through Ansible.
• Use Netbox as the data source for ansible. A playbook pulls the switch configuration from Netbox and applies it to the switch using ansible. All changes go through Netbox.

What would be preferred? Both solve the Problem of having to change everything twice.