X10SRi-F and NVMe boot, possible?

[LIGISTX]

Hi guys, I am not very familiar with how NVMe is handled for booting, but I just ordered a X10SRi-F for a homelab upgrade and figured if I can get a PCIe card to slot a NVMe SSD into, I’d prefer this for my proxmox host and it’s VM’s over a SATA ssd.

That said, I don’t fully understand how to determine if it can actually boot from this device. I do build desktops, have for 15+ years, but I’ll be honest I have been slightly confused by NVMe and it’s comparability since it’s release many years ago. The X10SRi-F has UEFI, but I am not certain if it has whatever is required to boot from a PCIe NVMe device, and looking at the manual and poking around forum threads has not really helped my understand. I did come across some posts about “making any mobo including legacy bios boards boot from NVMe with clover bootloader” etc, but as a server I more want to just “be stable and work”, I am not sure this route is right for me, nor is editing the BIOS imo which is another option I found.

Does anyone know if this board will natively boot from NVMe on a PCIe add on riser card?

[AbydosOne]

4 minutes ago, LIGISTX said:

Does anyone know if this board will natively boot from NVMe on a PCIe add on riser card?

While it's not exactly that board (or chipset for that matter), my X10SLL-F for sure doesn't support NVMe boot. I don't expect to find NVMe boot support until I hit Intel 6th-gen or AMD Ryzen. Haswell/Broadwell (the generation both our boards are from) is a year or two before NVMe really came into its own.

[Windows7ge]

If this is the direction you want to go I would separate the OS from what you're hosting the VM's on. There isn't anything wrong necessarily with using one drive but I also ran into this issue on a much newer motherboard.

 

PROXMOX won't benefit from NVMe. It's already very light weight and boots quickly. it has a NVMe driver so you can setup a ZFS storage pool and assign VM's to use it as their point of storage.

 

I'd run PROXMOX from SATA SSD or USB. If you want to eliminate cables look into SATA M.2. It should work though I've not tried it.

[Kilrah]

It's highly unlikely a board that doesn't have an m.2 slot will be able to boot NVMe, given that even most of the first gen of boards that did couldn't. 

 

There have been BIOS hacks for some boards but it tended to be for the popular enthusiast stuff...

[LIGISTX]

3 hours ago, AbydosOne said:

While it's not exactly that board (or chipset for that matter), my X10SLL-F for sure doesn't support NVMe boot. I don't expect to find NVMe boot support until I hit Intel 6th-gen or AMD Ryzen. Haswell/Broadwell (the generation both our boards are from) is a year or two before NVMe really came into its own.

 

2 hours ago, Windows7ge said:

If this is the direction you want to go I would separate the OS from what you're hosting the VM's on. There isn't anything wrong necessarily with using one drive but I also ran into this issue on a much newer motherboard.

 

PROXMOX won't benefit from NVMe. It's already very light weight and boots quickly. it has a NVMe driver so you can setup a ZFS storage pool and assign VM's to use it as their point of storage.

 

I'd run PROXMOX from SATA SSD or USB. If you want to eliminate cables look into SATA M.2. It should work though I've not tried it.

 

2 hours ago, Kilrah said:

It's highly unlikely a board that doesn't have an m.2 slot will be able to boot NVMe, given that even most of the first gen of boards that did couldn't. 

 

There have been BIOS hacks for some boards but it tended to be for the popular enthusiast stuff...

 

All, it appears as though it should work! Supermicro lists it as supported for this product, now the question is, would any NVMe rider work? Hmm. 

 

Thanks for the input tho! They certainly don’t make finding this info simple. 
 

https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/accessories/addon/AOC-SLG3-2M2.php

[Windows7ge]

54 minutes ago, LIGISTX said:

 

 

 

All, it appears as though it should work! Supermicro lists it as supported for this product, now the question is, would any NVMe rider work? Hmm. 

 

Thanks for the input tho! They certainly don’t make finding this info simple. 
 

https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/accessories/addon/AOC-SLG3-2M2.php

Validated as a boot device or just as a expanded storage device? You have to be careful about their wording when it comes to these kinds of things.

 

That's just a bifurcation riser with supermicros name on it. Nothing too special. This doesn't guarantee you can boot from NVMe just that you can use NVMe drives on the board which is very often the case even with boards that don't support NVMe boot such as my X10DRi-T.

[LIGISTX]

2 hours ago, Windows7ge said:

Validated as a boot device or just as a expanded storage device? You have to be careful about their wording when it comes to these kinds of things.

 

That's just a bifurcation riser with supermicros name on it. Nothing too special. This doesn't guarantee you can boot from NVMe just that you can use NVMe drives on the board which is very often the case even with boards that don't support NVMe boot such as my X10DRi-T.

Theoretically.... https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/x10sri-f-and-nvme-boot-possible.35279/

 

Cross posting always helps get answers

 

I was unsure as are you, but it seems as though it should. I suppose worst case I boot from a SATA DOM or throw away SSD and run VM's off the riser card.