Hypervisor 1RU 2024

This is the build about the hypervisor in 2024.

This is a 1 RU server with fast local SSD, aprox 18TB of storage.

Bios settings

A patched bios is needed for this to boot of UEFI and also enable PCI hotplug menu in the bios. I was able to edit this and have posted the latest version here.

Disk Layout

Boot disk = 128g mirror ZFS 

ZFS storage

5 vdev's mirrored of the SAS disks 
2 mirror NVME 256g partition, but dedicated on the whole disk.  This can grow.
optional log and l2arc on the boot NVME's
 

Backplane

The onboard backplane is a BPN-SAS3-116A-N2 which has 8 SAS disks and then 2 NVME or SAS. Howerver this last thing is not true if you want to run 10 SAS disks. The right most NVME/SAS ports are called "SAS2" ports on the backplane, but are really SATA ports, and connected to the onboard SATA. As this is a backplane only, not an expander each physical SAS port from the controller is connected to one SAS drive. Since the included controller only had 8 ports, a 16 port controller is used.

NVME name spaces

The NVME come setup as 1.88T disks:

tnvmcap   : 1,880,375,648,256
unvmcap   : 375,648,256

I suspect this is a 2.0 TiB (2,199,023,255,552b) provisioned down in the controller or about 85%. moving this to a 1.56TB disk will under provision this and make it perform better in the event we use it as log or write intensive.

Reference material

https://medium.com/@reefland/over-provisioning-ssd-for-increased-performance-and-write-endurance-142feb015b4e