I am in the process of specing out a new cluster of servers for Vmware.
Our old stack uses 3 x dualcore AMD EPYC cases that had a RAID card connected to 24 SAS drives. It shows up as one large drive in ESXi.
My question is how do you configure 24 nvme drives in ESXi when you can’t use a RAID card with them?
My understanding is that they will show up as 24 individual drives with no redunancy.
I’ve thought about this too and done some slipshod testing in my lab environment. Right now my best answer is that you need a software based file system to essentially raid these disks together.
You can try VMware VSAN or Starwind VSAN.
I also saw something that uses an Nvidia GPU as a NVME Raid controller https://www.graidtech.com/ that looks interesting but have never used it.
If you wanted to try truenas, Alan Jude has a talk on about tuning ZFS for NVME which is fairly recent.
Now if you’re also running ESXI on this system, you’re going to need to either pass the individual nvme devices somehow to your VM that will be running truenas IOMMU style or essentially create a VMDK file for each disk mounted to the TruenasVM.
… The last one is probably a bad idea.
Ymmv but I would like to see others give it a go!
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