Question Regarding to Intel Virtual Raid

[phnguyen90]

Hello everyone,

I just wondering if anyone here has experience of setting up the Intel VROC before? I have one client want to setting up Raid 0 (With NVME) and Raid 1 (with SSD) one system.

I had never set up anything like this before and I am little confuse on the installation therefore I would like to find more information on this set up such as performance and reliability

Here is the system information:

2 x Intel Xeon Platinum 8176
1 x Gigabyte 9MR91FS0NR-00
12 x 32GB DDR4 2666mhz
2 x Samsung 1TB GB Data Center SSD
4 x Samsung 512GB NVME

Thank you in advances

 

[WANg]

I am sorry, did you just use "RAID0" and "reliable" on the same sentence?

Do you understand what VROC does, what limitations it has, and what performance improvements / gotchas you might have to contend with?
VROC stands for Virtual RAID on CPU - what it does is that it allows Xeon CPUs with a crapload of PCIe lanes to leverage multiple NVMe SSDs via RAID methodology - the idea is that since the CPU is talking to the storage directly, it should be able to use some logic to talk to those NVMe drives using a RAID configuration for better redundancy.

In the olden days, if your machine has to address multiple drives for RAID, you'll have to go through an HBA card (which is usually PCIe x4, has its own RAM, its own battery for writebacks, stuff like that) -

There are several catches:
a) You need a module (containing a hardware key) to enable VROC, which might or might not be shipped with your mainboard model
b) Depending on which VROC level you are dealing with, you can either use third party NVMe SSD, or Intel only. It can support RAID0/1/5/10 (Premium) or just 0/1/10 (Standard). Of course, you'll need to know which storage form factor you are dealing with on the board. it could be standard M.2 2280, or it could be U.2 (which is Enterprise M.2). If you bought M.2 cards you'll need adapters, and those adapters need to be tested for reliability.
c) The whole thing is Intel proprietary, which means that it's a bit of a black box. If you run into issues where you'll need data recovery, you better hope whoever it is has a support contract with Intel to deal with the issue.

As for performance and reliability, it's just the same as setting up RAID levels in NVMe SSD. Enabling VROC would eliminate the overhead of going through the HBA, but that's about the only performance benefit you'll receive.

 

[gigatexal]

The data drives can be raided in software either in windows or Linux pretty easily.

 

[phnguyen90]

@WANg
Thank you very much for answering my question. As I noted above, this is the first time our customer request this kind of set up therefore I need to make sure to set it up correctly.
I really appreciate all the writing that you provided to help me better understand about the VROC

 

[phnguyen90]

I was able to set up the 8 U.2 into RAID 0 configuration with the VROC.
I had the wrong VROC key therefore I couldn't create the raid in the bios. After replaced with the Premium VROC key, everything are good now.