VSAN Support for DELLEMC BOSS Controller

Greetings,

Great news from DELLEMC for VSAN users today !

I have encountered several limitations in VSAN designs using DELLEMC Poweredge servers where using PERC H730 controllers will enable you to operate either in RAID0 or pass-through mode but not both.

This means that you have to use either one of the below solutions to overcome this limitation:

Option1: Operate H730 controller in pass-through mode and install ESXi on embedded SD-cards. In this situation, you need to handle logs and coredump redirection to remote syslog and coredump collector servers.

Option2: Operate H730 controller in RAID0 mode and install ESXi on a single SSD disks. In this case, you will have the limitations of VSAN operating on RAID0 and you have wasted disk slots in the server for ESXi installation which is not protected for a disk failure as well.

The great news from DELLEMC is that BOSS (Boot Optimized Storage Solution) controller is now supported for VSAN.

BOSS is a new boot device introduced by DellEMC for use on the 14th generation of PowerEdge servers. It has the below benefits to solve these limitations:

– The BOSS device provides a hardware mirror option so that the user can create a RAID1 and install ESXi on the LUN from redundancy point of view. This means logs and coredumps will be stored locally on RAID1 in this case.
– In addition to RAID1, this controller can operate in passthrough mode (Non RAID) which is the best solution for VSAN disks.

For more information, please check the below article from DELLEMC:
http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/b/techcenter/archive/2018/03/29/operating-system-support-for-boss-boot-optimized-storage-solution-device

Share this information if you find it helpfull.

Mohamad Alhussein

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