Nvme raid setup

Computer Hardware & Server Infrastructure Builds
1

I was looking to buy a few Dell servers and install xcp-ng on them and use local storage to run some VM’s

The spec of the servers is this.

Dell R740XD 2U Rackmount Server
24 x 2.5” NVMe Chassis
Dual x Intel Xeon 6240C 2.6GHz 18C/36T CPU
256Gb DDR4 Ram
10 x 1.6TB NVMe SSD
Dell PERC S140 OB Raid Controller
Broadcom 57416 DP 1GB/ DP 10GB Nic
iDrac Enterprise
Redundant PSU
Rackmount Kit

For all previous kit we setup either spinning or SSD drives to use RAID 50 but the S140 doesn’t support anything other than RAID 1 and I’m being told that using RAID will kill the performance of the nvme drives. Does a raid card exist that does this that I’m missing.

What configuration would you run this in so that we can survive a disk failure without killing everthing. Lots of RAID 1 groups seems a bit sill as well. Any recommended reading or vidoes on nvme and RAID ?

2

When we build systems with NVME using ZFS to control the drives would be better. XCP-NG has support for ZFS but I don’t think there is a way to have XCP-NG use ZFS for the boot device so you might want to add some smaller drives for that as the OS drive does not need a 1.6TB NVME.

3

I remember seeing you mention experimental ZFS support in one of your videos but not sure i fancy running production systems on it just yet. Have you ever used it ?

4

We use ZFS on TrueNAS as an external storage system but not natively in XCP-NG.