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August 24th, 2025 14:14
Dell R7515 support for mirrored NVME and booting from those drives.
With the second hand market being full of NVME u.2 Dell drives, I've been thinking of replacing some of my sata drives.
I'm currently booting esxi off a pair of Dell 480gb drives (mirrored), and have a pair of samsung 1tb ssds (mirrored) as a datastore.
Was thinking of getting a pair of 4tb dell/ intel u.2s.
Can I mirror them using S150 (software raid)? and can the r7515 boot off a mirrored raid nvme? I know esxi doesn't support software raid in itself so it would have to be done at the hardware level.
The other idea I had was to upgrade from those four dirves to two 3.84tb dell sata drives and use the onboard perc, which I know I can boot from - the only downside of this is that I'm limited to sata speeds.
DELL-Chris H
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August 25th, 2025 12:29
Bigh-aus,
The issue you would run into with that scenario is that ESXi doesn't support the S150 software controller. What I would recommend is using the BOSS-S1 controller (part # 7HYY4), it is a viable solution for booting VMware ESXi from a mirrored RAID 1 configuration using M.2 SATA SSDs.
Let me know if this helps.
bigh-aus
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August 25th, 2025 13:47
Hi Chris - wouldn't bootability be set by the dell firmware? Either UEFI or Bios allowing you to use s150 rather than the operating system be the thing that supports booting?
I do have a spare boss card setup but was looking to go straight NVME only. (Also thank you for listing the part number, Dell needs to make their compatible part numbers more accessible.)
DELL-Chris H
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August 25th, 2025 14:06
While ESXi does not support software RAID (like S150) natively. I believe you are correct that if the RAID is configured at the firmware level (UEFI), ESXi will see the virtual disk as a single logical volume.
I understand the request, but a compatibility list would be very large, and changing on a daily basis based on availability.