Supermicro X9SRL NVMe support

[nry]

Currently looking at getting a NVMe drive to replace my SSD RAID.

Thinking of adding a Lycom DT-120 card combined with a 1TB SM961 to my Supermicro X9SRL / Xeon E5-1620v2.

Providing I'm not booting from the drive, there shouldn't be any complications using this with ESXi as a datastore?

 

[Tom5051]

ESXi 6 and above support NVMe out of the box. I found with my Intel 750 that the Read/Write speed the VM was getting was quite poor, I needed install the Intel NVMe driver which drastically improved speeds close to the Intel specs.
Check the vendor website in case they supply drivers like that.

 

[nry]

Thanks, just found this VMware ESXi 6.0 Windows 10 VM speed comparison between Intel 750 Series NVMe SSD and Samsung 950 PRO M.2 NVMe SSD | TinkerTry IT @ Home

Looks like the Samsung 950 Pro is plug and play, would hope the same applies for the SM961! Although you have me looking at the Intel 750 1.2TB now

 

[Tom5051]

With my limited funds, I managed to purchase a couple of configurations, 3x Samsung 850 Pro in Raid 0, Samsung 950 pro, a Samsung 960 pro, and an Intel 750, for testing purposes in my home lab.
The 960 Pro leaves the rest in it's wake. I suspect the Intel is probably going to last longer but that's what Veeam 9.5 is for

 

[nry]

Quite the setup!

I can't justify the extra cost of the 960 Pro 1TB over the SM961 1TB, performance seems quite similar.

Regarding backups I was having the same thought, as long as they are backed up nightly I shouldn't have any issues, is there a free version of Veeam now?

 

[Tom5051]

Veeam offer a free NFR license for up to 2 CPU sockets, (2x hosts if single CPU) but you need a licensed copy of ESXi, they don't support the free version of ESXi.

Here’s how you can get a free Veeam NFR license key