Lenovo Intel VROC (VMD NVMe RAID) Premium

Lenovo Intel VROC (VMD NVMe RAID) Premium Intel VROC (Virtual RAID on CPU) is a feature of the Intel processor that enables RAID support. There are two separate functions of VROC:

Intel VROC SATA RAID, formerly known as Intel RSTe

Intel VROC NVMe RAID

VROC SATA RAID (RSTe) is available and supported with all SATA drives, both SATA SSDs and SATA HDDs. If offers a 6 Gb/s connection to each drive and on the SR650 V2 implements RAID levels 0, 1, 5, and 10.

VROC NVMe RAID offers RAID support for any NVMe drives directly connected to the ports on the server's system board or via adapters such as NVMe retimers or NVMe switch adapters. On the SR650 V2, it implements RAID levels 0, 1, 5, and 10.

Performance tip: For best performance with VROC NVMe RAID, the drives in an array should all be connected to the same processor. Spanning processors is possible however performance will be unpredictable and should be evaluated based on your workload.

By default, VROC NVMe RAID support is limited to use with only Intel-branded NVMe drives (feature B9X7). If you wish to enable RAID support for non-Intel NVMe SSDs, select the VROC Premium license using the ordering information in the following table. VROC Premium is fulfilled as a Feature on Demand (FoD) license and is activated via the XCC management processor user interface.

VROC Premium is only needed for non-Intel NVMe drives in a RAID configuration. You do not need the VROC Premium license upgrade under any of the following conditions:

If you have SATA drives connected to the onboard SATA ports, you do not need VROC Premium

If you have Intel NVMe drives connected to the onboard NVMe ports, you do not need VROC Premium

If you have non-Intel NVMe drives connected to the onboard NVMe ports, but you don’t want RAID support, you do not need VROC Premium

Virtualization support: Virtualization support for Intel VROC is as follows:

VROC SATA RAID (RSTe): VROC SATA RAID is not supported by virtualization hypervisors such as ESXi, KVM, Xen, and Hyper-V. Virtualization is only supported on the onboard SATA ports in AHCI (non-RAID) mode.

VROC (VMD) NVMe RAID: VROC (VMD) NVMe RAID is supported by ESXi, KVM, Xen, and Hyper-V. ESXi support is limited to RAID 1 only; other RAID levels are not supported. Windows and Linux OSes support VROC RAID NVMe, both for host boot functions and for guest OS function, and RAID-0, 1, 5, and 10 are supported.

https://lenovopress.com/lp1392-thinksystem-sr650-v2-server#c...