Test results for Dell Poweredge R770 with NVMe drives

[yllar]

I will share some test results for the community, maybe helps somebody.

1. Server spec:

This is the latest generation Dell server with Intel Efficiency core CPUs and NVMe disks.
All firmware and BIOS versions are latest as of 28.04.2025

Dell Poweredge R770
2.5" Chassis with up to 8 NVMe HWRAID Drives, Front PERC 12 (H965i)
2 x Intel Xeon 6 Efficient 6740E 2.4G, 96C/96T, 24GT/s, 96M Cache, Turbo, (250W) DDR5-6400
BOSS-N1 controller card + with 2 M.2 480GB (RAID 1) (22x80) Rear
Broadcom 57508 Dual Port 100GbE QSFP56, OCP NIC 3.0
2 x 800G Data Center NVMe Mixed Use AG Drive U2 Gen4 with carrier
2 x 32GB RDIMM, 6400MT/s, Dual Rank

Virtual disks set up in iDRAC:
vd1 - RAID1 (2 x 480GB) virtual disk configured in iDRAC
vd2 - RAID1 (2 x 800G) virtual disk configured in Perc H965i

2. Results for latest XCP-ng 8.2

Virtual disks and network is detected normally.
XCP-ng installation to vd1 is successful.
Since vd2 has 4K sectors, it is not usable in a standard way.
Need to use SR with type=largeblock (https://xcp-ng.org/forum/topic/8901/largeblocksr-for-4kib-blocksize-disks).
Currently only one SR with type=largeblock can be created in one host. Adding multiple will cause errors.
In the long run there will be support for 4k sector NVMe disks with SMAPIv3 (https://xcp-ng.org/blog/2024/04/19/first-smapiv3-driver-is-available-in-preview/)

3. Results for latest XCP-ng 8.3

Never reaches install console
Fails to detect storage and network
Gets stuck at "Started Update UTMP about System Runlevel Changes." as seen on screenshot.
I did try starting install console with command "/opt/xensource/installer/preinit console" and it started but cant get too far with it, see last 2 screenshots

[olivierlambert]

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