PowerEdge T130 NVME boot

Hi,

We do not support NVMe on this server. The only Fedora compatible controllers we have are the H330 and H730 and they are SAS/SATA and not NVMe. 

It may work, we only have validated our two cards, those would be the best option. 

Thank you for your response. How about AHCI expansion card? Can I boot off of SATA III pcie card?

Thanks

Hi Josh,

I believe PCIE NVMe boot is already a mature function, and is widely supported in many Dell PCs now. 

Although this is a low end server in Dell's market segment, but, I believe many customers use this machine as a powerful workstation. I also believe many customers are demanding this feature and pursuing better performance as it is becoming a standard one on other PCs. I don't think a reason of not supporting it on the T130. I wonder if Dell will add this feature in near future BIOS update? 

I believe many customers use this machine as a powerful workstation

I have a really hard time believing that. It is not powerful by any standards. Even the Optiplex can be configured with as much RAM and processors and drives comparable in performance (and better). Not to mention the Precision lineup if someone were really after a "powerful workstation". Anyone using a server, especially a low-end server like the T130 as a "powerful workstation" has paid too much money for too little tech.

I'm not saying it shouldn't be an option, and I think it will as it becomes standard on even low-end boards, like USB 3.0 was slower to be adopted on servers than on desktops, but I do think that the premise for expecting it to be an option in such a low-end machine is wrong. Most people buying the T130 simply are not in the market for that kind of tech, certainly not enough for Dell to invest to add the functionality. SATA SSD is more than adequate for the T130.

Is dissecting usage scenarios relevant to answering whether feature x works on product y?  I think the answer is probably more important.

I had the same question in another thread about the T30, which is about a year newer than the T130. The information is impossible to come by. The manual doesn't say that it does, but it doesn't say that it doesn't, either.

Also, this word "support" is unfortunate as used early in this thread. What does that even mean?  Most likely it means "Dell doesn't sell a solution to make it happen on your server, therefore if you've decided to go ahead anyway, any support issues that you may have in the future is fruit of the poisonous tree, and we reserve the right to hang up on you."

Whereas we just want to know "Can this be done, yes or no."

It may be as much a question for Intel as for Dell. It was not part of the Dell's design, and the functionality is untested by Dell, which means it is "unsupported". Doesn't mean it won't work, just means that Dell can't say that it will (or won't) work, but there also shouldn't be the expectation that it should. The forums are a good place to share what does and doesn't work outside of Dell's designed usage scenarios.

Sorry to dredge up an old conversation, but I wanted to add to it, since I have run across the same questions about the T30 and the T130.

It does seem the T130 does not support booting from an NVMe SSD in a PCI-e slot.  Neither via BIOS or NVMe.  The T30, on the other hand, DID support it, until Dell REMOVED IT PURPOSEFULLY in Bios 1.0.3.

So there is something to be said about whether a system has the capability or whether Dell has purposefully disabled it.

Now, the T130 and T30 are LOW COST servers for companies/individuals with LOW COST budgets.  To expect us to go out and buy enterprise grade components is a bit ridiculous.  

The T130, to make matters worse, has ONE SATA PORT and no aux power to power a SATA SSD.  I could run SSD's off the H730 but seems a waste of cached PERC ports.

It would be nice to have the ability to boot from a NVMe card in a PCI-e slot.  My guess is, like the T30, the code IS there in the BIOS, but a flip of a bit has it turned off, just like Dell did with the T30.

To further dredge up an old thread - because I recently purchased a T130 to act as a home testlab.

I wanted to maximise the storage and so was interested in booting off a 5th drive in order to leave the 4 main drives, hooked to the RAID controller, as data stores.

I noted that the motherboard had 2 SATA ports - one of which was used by the Optical Drive, so I hooked an SSD to the other port and found it was recognised by the BIOS and so could host the boot drive. The stumbling block was power for the extra drive - The T130 has no spare power connectors - and no easy point of splitting off power from one of the built in cables.

I guess, if you didn't have a need for the optical drive, it could be sacrificed in favour of an SSD - it would require a power adapter to go from the 4-pin Optical power to a normal SATA power cable.

Having found this thread, I came up with the following solution:

Rivo Dual M.2 SATA III and M2 to PCIe 3.0 X4 Adapter Card

Samsung 250 GB 860 EVO M.2 Sata III Solid State Drive

The Rivo card comes with a SATA lead which I plugged into the spare SATA port on the Motherboard and the PCIe card supplies the power to the M.2 card.

The above is recognised by the BIOS, so it can be installed with a bootable OS (Windows Server 2019 in my case).

Note that everything I could find said that the T130 does not support booting from NVMe cards so I stuck with a M.2 SATA. Obviously performance will take a hit, but for my use case it was plenty good enough

I know this is an old thread - but I recently purchased a T130 to act as a home testlab.

I wanted to maximise the storage and so was interested in booting off a 5th drive in order to leave the 4 main drives, hooked to the RAID controller, as data stores.

I noted that the motherboard had 2 SATA ports - one of which was used by the Optical Drive, so I hooked an SSD to the other port and found it was recognised by the BIOS and so could host the boot drive. The stumbling block was power for the extra drive - The T130 no spare power connectors - and no easy point of splitting off power from one of the built in cables.

I guess, if you didn't have a need for the optical drive, it could be sacrificed in favour of an SSD - it would require a power adaptor to go from the 4-pin Optical power to a normal SATA power cable.

Having found this thread, I came up with the following solution:

Rivo Dual M.2 SATA III and M2 to PCIe 3.0 X4 Adapter Card

Samsung 250 GB 860 EVO M.2 Sata III Solid State Drive

The Rivo card comes with a SATA lead which I plugged into the spare SATA port on the Motherboard and the PCIe card supplies the power to the M.2 card.

Just to be clear - the Rivo card will support BOTH an M2.SATA and an M.2 NVME Drive - however, the former must be plugged into a SATA port on the motherboard in order to be recognised, whilst the NVME is recognisable via the PCIe bus - so long as the mobo/BIOS supports this (which the T130 doesn't)

The M.2 SATA card was recognised by the BIOS, so it could be installed with a bootable OS (Windows Server 2019 in my case).

Note that everything I could find said that the T130 doesnot support booting from NVMe cards so I stuck with a M.2 SATA. Obviously performance will take a hit, but for my use case it was plenty good enough.

Thank you for your suggestion, it helped me a lot!

Old thread. Sorry. Been covered in previous posts. But...I have successfully booted this machine from the Intel 750 400 GB PCIe NVMe SSD for years and years by now. It was our production SQL machine, even. Booting from other PCIe drives I tried didn’t work. Disappointing.

I have come to the conclusion that the Intel SSD in question (and possibly one or two others of the type, none of which are terribly modern NVMe parts) are bootable. For sure. It is likely related to an option ROM embedded in the attached SSD hardware. Apparently, booting from NVMe was considered (rightly) problematic at its inception and this (workaround?) was implemented in some early hardware. Did I have to “enable optionROMs” in the BIOS? Dunno...it was too long ago to recall, though that seems logical if it is not a default parameter setting.

Be aware that I had to slipstream the Intel driver into the MS Server installation like you do. It was slightly difficult back then. And Samsung had no Server compatible drivers, if memory serves me. If you encounter weird boot problems, the easiest way would probably be to install Server 20xx on a SATA drive, install Intel drivers, change bootloader to use PCIe volume if needed, then clone to the NVMe disk. Of course, you’d need to  revert whatever bootloader changes were required *before reboot* in case something goes awry. (Do these crazy hacks ever work right the first time for you, unlike me? Didn’t think so.  Plan on three iterations for anything wacky, right?)

The 750 is not currently the fastest NVMe drive on the planet but it still blows the pants off of SATA equivalents. Also, it is really solid enterprise-grade hardware. Is it some kind of fabled “datacenter” quality, whatever that is? Um...I cannot answer that. But it’s **bleep** good, so why split hairs at this point with a mid level commodity server you’re trying to eek some life out of? And the price of the SSD nowadays is actually sane, unlike back then. Give it a go, you won’t be disappointed. 

Two options I use to get an nvme drive working on my T130 (via a simple pcie add in card)

1) use clover boot on a usb stick so you can boot directly via nvme

2) use free esxi on a usb stick. And keep your VMs on the nvme drive.

After experiencing this issue as well and then performing some testing, I can add Micron 7400, 7450, 9300, and 9400 drives to the list of NVME drives that will boot 13th gen Dell servers without any additional help(USB drives, ect..).