Intel Vroc Experiences?
Hi,
Has anyone had any experience with Intel Vroc[1]? I’m possibly having to deal with a new server with such technology and can’t find much (real world) information about it. Looking at the specs it’s basically a glorified fake raid which usually turns on my alarm bells. Has anyone done any testing, how does it compare with “real” raid or software raid?
Cheers, Lucian
[1] – https://www.intel.co.uk/content/www/uk/en/support/articles/000024498/memory-and-storage/ssd-software.html
2 thoughts on - Intel Vroc Experiences?
Intel FAQ had the following nugget of info but I’ve yet to try it myself..
What is the difference between Intel® VROC and Linux* MD RAID?
Intel® VROC for Linux* is built upon MD RAID, and the Intel VROC team has an MD RAID maintainer on the team. However, Intel VROC has the following extra features:
* Provides UEFI HII and UEFI Shell command line RAID management
* Provides webpage-based, remote RAID management and RESTful APIs
* Fully validated and supported with Purley platform and
industry-select
* SSDs Provides hotfix/patch to specific customer issue on supported OS
Seems a mess of licensing and enabling too :-(
Also seen this from HPE:
http://www8.hp.com/h20195/v2/GetPDF.aspx/c05821090.pdf
And this from Intel:
https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-xeon-processor-scalable-family-technical-overview
/Peter K
From their description: Intel® VROC for Linux* is built upon MD RAID…
So, it is Linux MD RAID with some management addons. I prefer to stay far away from such addons.
A nice feature is the LED management, but who needs it if you have proper monitoring and are not in the DC anyway?
I prefer standard U.2 NVMe SSDs connected via PCIE to the CPU. Works wonderfully on AMD EPYC so I expect the same on Intel also.
Just don’t forget to adjust raid speed limits. I have
dev.raid.speed_limit_max = 10000000
dev.raid.speed_limit_min = 15000
to enjoy full sync speed.
Regards, Simon