Jul 22, 20212 min read

NVMe RAID Storage Solutions for VMware Platforms

Updated: Aug 4, 2021

If you need bootable NVMe RAID storage for a VMware based virtual machine application, we would recommend our FnL BRD Series NVMe AIC RAID drives. BRD Drives are true plug-and-play RAID solutions and are available with 1-8TB of preconfigured RAID 1 or 0 storage.

FnL BRD series AIC drives are fully compatible with PCIe 3.0 and 4.0 host platforms, and are natively supported by current versions of VMware; no driver, or separate application is required! Just install VMware per standard procedure; it will automatically recognize the BRD RAID volume as a standard disk.

Tuned for Virtual Machine Platforms

BRD series NVMe AIC RAID drives are tuned to deliver exceptional random I/O performance - ideal for bootable configurations and Virtual Machine solutions.

Each OS hosted by the VMware server is known as a Virtual Machine – virtual machines are designed to function as remote workstation platforms – essentially as virtual replacements for physical computers.

A single BRD6204PB, equipped with four Samsung 980PRO Series SSD’s is capable of delivering and astounding 1,579,000 IOPS!

However, The BRD6204PB is also capable of delivering over 7000MB/s of sequential transfer performance – basically, maxing out the PCIe 3.0 x8 bus.

Benchmarking Each Virtual Machine

We recently tested a VM platform configured to manage four virtual machines, using the BRD6202P and BRD6204P AIC drives.

The Windows 10 and Server 2019 VM’s were benchmarked using CrystalDiskMark. FIO was used to test the RHEL and Ubuntu server VM’s. The BRD AIC Drives were configured as RAID 0 arrays in order to maximize transfer throughput.

The results show how well equipped the BRD series are for a VM platform even with only 4 NVMe SSD’s (maximum) and a PCIe 3.0 x8 host interface.

Note: The IOPS results (I/O’s per second) are lower than the base test shown above, as they were generated for each individual virtual machine (while these virtual machines were in use), as opposed to the virtual machine platform itself (VMware).

Test Platform: ASUS WS X299 (Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-7900X CPU @3.30GHz / 32GB)

Virtual Machine #1: Windows 10

BRD6202: