Dell PowerEdge Express Flash NVMe PCIe SSD Adapter User’s Guide

In Windows-based systems, the NVMe PCIe SSDs have a controller entity and a device entity. The controller entity is displayed under the Storage controller menu in the Device Manager.

Use the controller entity when installing or updating the NVMe PCIe SSD driver. You can configure the NVMe PCIe SSD for use on Windows from Computer Management > Storage > Disk Management Tool .

On Linux-based systems, you can configure the NVMe PCIe SSD from the partitioning tool by specifying or selecting the device name. The device name for NVMe PCIe SSDs is /dev/nvmeXn1, where X is the number corresponding to each NVMe PCIe SSD in the system (For example: /dev/nvme0n1; /dev/nvme1n1; /dev/nvme2n1 and so on).

Use OpenManage Server Administrator for managing and performing NVMe PCIe SSD-related tasks. For more information, see Configuring and managing your NVMe PCIe SSD adapter .

In VMware systems, you can configure the NVMe PCIe SSD as datastore or for a passthrough operation. You can use vSphere Client to configure the NVMe PCIe SSD. Configuring PCIe devices as passthrough is not recommended due to the following limitations:

• You cannot take snapshots of the Virtual Machine (VM).

• Your VM cannot use failover features such as VMotion and Distributed Resources Scheduler (DRS).

• You cannot hot-add any other device to the VM such as a USB key. To add an additional device, first shut down the VM.

Configuring NVMe PCIe SSD as passthrough is not recommended outside of Dell-specific solutions. See the solution-specific documentation at Dell.com/support/manuals.