RDM with SAS drives in HBA

[LittleWave]

According to vSphere 7.0 documentation:

• The RDM is not available for direct-attached block devices or certain RAID devices. The RDM uses a SCSI serial number to identify the mapped device. Because block devices and some direct-attach RAID devices do not export serial numbers, they cannot be used with RDMs.

Are SAS drives connected to a HBA considered direct-attached block devices or LUNs that can be mapped to a VM? I've seen some workarounds but should it work out of the box and be fully supported these days?

My use case would be to pass SAS drives directly to a VM for creating a ZFS storage pool.

[LittleWave]

I realized that I could actually passthrough the whole HBA controller to the VM since it doesn't have anything else connected to it. Would this be the preferred way instead trying to pass individual drives? Any insight would be appreciated, thanks.