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You are here: Home / Home Lab / Dual Intel M.2 Optane 4801x in Supermicro E300-9D

Dual Intel M.2 Optane 4801x in Supermicro E300-9D

01.14.2019 by William Lam // 11 Comments

For those that have been following along, I have been testing the Supermicro E300-9D (SYS-E300-9D-8CN8TP) kit in my home lab which I have written about here. One of the last things I was looking into was storage expandability with this platform, especially since Supermicro has a PCIe Add-On Card (AOC-SLG3-2M2) which can add two additional M.2 devices supporting 2260 (60mm), 2280 (80mm) & 22110 (110mm) form factors.

At the same time, our friends over at Intel had just given me access to a couple of their pre-release Intel M.2 Optane 4801x devices which were then released right before the holiday last year. For those wondering why Optane is so interesting, especially from a vSAN perspective, check out this blog post here from my good buddy Pete Flecha over in our Storage and Availability Business Unit (SABU).


This was actually perfect timing as I was also interested to see if there were any high performance and supported M.2 devices that could be used for for vSAN Caching and this device would definitely fit the bill! When I had initially received all the components, I was scratching my head as the AOC was too big to fit horizontally in the E300-9D.

I then came to learn that the AOC is supposed to be installed vertically and this was made possible with an additional Supermicro vertical PCIe riser card that I was actually missing.


Once I had the vertical riser, the AOC plugged right in and then I could connect everything into the E300-9D as shown in the picture below.


The next issue I had ran into was after booting up the system I could NOT see both of the Optane devices. I thought perhaps they were faulty or the AOC or riser were having problems and manually verified that each device was visible independently on the system. I was still not able to figure it out and went on Twitter to see if any of my followers had worked with the AOC before as this was my first time using it. With the help from Paul Braren over at TinkerTry, I learned that I needed to enable bifurcation which would allow the system to see both M.2 devices and it looks like the instructions to do this may vary from system to system. Paul linked to me to the specific E300-9D motherboard documentation and I found what I needed on Page 76.

As a reference for myself and others, you will need to enable this in the BIOS by navigating to Advanced->Chipset Configuration->North Bridge->IIO Configuration->CPU Configuration and then under the IOUx, change the value from default to x4x4x4x4. Save your changes and then reboot


Once this configuration change was made, I immediately saw both Optane devices, whew! I was then able to setup vSAN using both of these devices as shown in the screenshot below:


Note: You may have noticed I have an additional Samsung M.2 device showing up in the same vSAN Diskgroup as my Intel Optane devices, this was purely from a testing standpoint and is not recommended to mix capacity devices with different IO and performance characteristics together.

I know someone of you might be wondering if this device is on both the vSphere and VSAN HCL, it looks like it just maps to the existing Intel SSD DC 4800x series Optane as the M.2 Optane has the exact same values for VID, DID & SVID as the existing 4800x series device.

For basic home lab usage, you easily add an additional M.2 (2280) using a cheap PCIe to NVMe M.2 (also possible on E200-8D) as outlined in this post here but if you are looking to get the best performance or getting up to two additional M.2 devices, you may want to consider adding the Supermicro AOC and Intel Optane devices. The cost of the two cards were $49 USD for the AOC-SLG3-2M2 and $15 USD for the PCIe Vertical Riser, both sold from Supermicro or any of their resellers.

More from my site

  • Removable M.2 NVMe SSD PCIe enclosure by Icy Dock
  • Intel NUC 9 Pro & Extreme - First "Modular" NUC
  • Thunderbolt 3 enclosures with (Single, Dual & Quad) M.2 NVMe SSDs for ESXi
  • Supermicro E300-9D (SYS-E300-9D-8CN8TP) is a nice ESXi & vSAN kit
  • Useful M.2 NVMe accessories for vSphere (VSAN/VMFS) Home Labs

Categories // Home Lab, Uncategorized Tags // E300-9D, Intel Optane, M.2, PCIe, VSAN

Comments

  1. *protectedSimon Sparks says

    01/14/2019 at 9:20 am

    2260 (60cm), 2280 (80cm) & 22110 (110cm)

    I think you mean mm not cm

    Reply
    • William Lam says

      01/14/2019 at 10:59 am

      Fixed 🙂

      Reply
  2. *protectedmhueller says

    01/14/2019 at 10:45 pm

    Hi William,
    very interesting as always - but the AOC card is called AOC-SLG3-2M2 not SM2

    Reply
  3. *protectedBrent Douglas says

    01/15/2019 at 6:56 pm

    Hi! Nice write-up. You didn’t mention the queue depth of the 4801. Can you mention now? Is the depth “deep” enough to not beca concern...or, maybe it has a “shallow” depth but clears quickly due to very low latency as to not be an issue. For reference, ESXi 6.7U1 reports a queue depth of 1032 for the Samsung 960 seried NVMe drives.

    Thanks is advance,
    Brent

    Reply
    • William Lam says

      01/16/2019 at 5:06 am

      The queue depth reported by the device is 1020

      Reply
      • *protectedbdouglas says

        01/17/2019 at 6:01 am

        Thanks! Group buy on some 4801x? 😉

        Reply
  4. *protectedJason says

    02/12/2019 at 3:30 pm

    Does Vmware support the SoC RAID1?

    Reply
  5. *protectedConrad Capeland says

    07/11/2019 at 2:26 pm

    Wonder if you could have just used these single adapters for both PCIe slots without the right angle bracket. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07CZF7WGQ
    Not that the parts you used were expensive, though.

    Reply
  6. *protectedMark Steele says

    11/03/2019 at 2:57 pm

    I swapped out the fans on my E300 to the NOCTUA NF-A4x20 PWM ones and the machine went from being rather load to very quiet. Just as an FYI.

    Reply
  7. *protectedrtfm says

    09/02/2020 at 1:22 am

    hi,
    is it possible to use only one optane disk? in that case, is it ok to use 2 * M.2 2TB NVMe devices for the capacity tier? Moreover, is it possible to use both optane and capacity M.2 on the supermicro carrier?

    Reply
  8. *protectedRichard July says

    06/19/2021 at 9:10 am

    Is there a difference between the speed of the AOC-based M.2 drive versus the motherboard based socket? Which would be a better choice for use as cache versus capacity, or does it not matter? Also, does the cache need to be of the same performance spec as the capacity? I was thinking to use the Optane for caching and a different larger drive for capacity...

    -Richard

    Reply

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William is Distinguished Platform Engineering Architect in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Division at Broadcom. His primary focus is helping customers and partners build, run and operate a modern Private Cloud using the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform.

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