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I need help with the configuration of RAIDs on the ASUS RS720-E10-RS12 server. We have installed 2x 512GB NVME drives in the motherboard slots and 12x SATA SSDs in the Backplane slots. I can only create a RAID from the NVME disks, and the option for RAID for SATAs is then disabled, or I can create a RAID for SATAs, but then the option for NVME RAID is disabled, which is a huge problem.

We need to set up a RAID for the 2 NVME disks (Mirrored) because we want to install VMWare ESXi on them.

Simultaneously, we need to set up RAID 5 or RAID 6 for the 12x SATA SSDs, which will be used for storage.

The problem is, as I mentioned earlier, that if I turn on Intel(R) VROC for NVME, I can create a RAID 1 from these two NVME disks, BUT it automatically switches all my SATAs to AHCI mode, while I need to keep them in RAID mode.

I am trying to configure this through the BIOS - American Megatrends - Aptio Setup - AMI.

So, is there any way to configure one RAID pool from two NVME disks for the system and at the same time another pool from the 12 SATA SSDs for storage?

hanshenrik
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demon420
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2 Answers2

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VMware doesn't support any sort of a software RAID concept, so you're out of luck here. What you can do however:

I. Software RAID

(1) Keep your UEFI-controlled & mirrored NVMe drives as a boot option. As long as VMware is OK with your pseudo-hardware RAID, of course! You should be fine with vROC & ESXi so far.

https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/85889

(2) Chop some part of the mirrored NVMe space as a local VM datastore.

https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/7.0/com.vmware.vsphere.storage.doc/GUID-5F08F7A7-6D8E-45A6-B408-278B3A4C7D4C.html

(3) Configure a VM with powerful software RAID, doing either whole controller PCI pass-thru or just individual SATA SSDs pass-thru. There are two options basically: FreeBSD-based TrueNAS "Core" (Debian Linux-based "Scale" shouldn't be used due to the overall immaturity) and Linux-based StarWind SAN & NAS. Later is preferred actually as unlike TrueNAS it supports both ZFS and MDRAID+XFS combo which is faster for SSDs, and has pre-built VMware virtual machine deployment out-of-box.

https://www.starwindsoftware.com/san-and-nas

(4) After you have it done you add iSCSI or NVMe-oF connection in a loopback and configure a new VM datastore, this one is software RAID protected.

https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/8.0/vsphere-storage/GUID-9C92500A-A408-4E91-BBA6-D90B5995D891.html

II. Hardware RAID

You can keep booting your system from the software-mirrored NVMe drives and just drop in an extra LSI RAID controller just for SATA SSDs. You won't get any better performance or data integrity as both ZFS and MDRAID+XFS rock, but at least it might be less complicated to manage. Just make sure your new shiny RAID is on VMware HCL.

https://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/detail.php?deviceCategory=io&productid=44985

NISMO1968
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The ASUS RS720-E10-RS12 uses an Intel PCH C621A, which supports VROC (for the NVME drives) or RSTe (for the SATA drives), depending on BIOS configuration.

Anyway, VMWare does not support RAID arrays based on RSTe, so you are not going to see your SATA array inside VMWare.

As a side note, "VMWare is better" generally refer to its leading position as virtualization platform. But the hardware support provided by QEMU/KVM (Linux) or HyperV (Windows) is much larger. For VMWare you should search the HCL (hardware compatibility list) before buying anything.

shodanshok
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