Does anyone use Samsung PM863a SSDs in HP DL360 G8 & G9s – specifically in a Windows Server 2016 Storage Space Direct mirrored implementation ? What is your experience of this ?
Having seen other posts about Proliants and 3rd party SSDs on these forums, I am aware of the dangers\limitations of using non-HP disks with Proliants, and the difficulties of getting the right caddies for 3rd party disks, so I'm not interested in any further warnings about these aspects, thanks. Most of these appear to be about using Consumer grade SSDs (e.g. Pro or EVo) as opposed to Enterprise grade (as the PM863a's are) and I should add I have been using Intel 3500 SSDs as mirrored OS disks for the G9 for the past 3 years without caddies and without any issue (except for the loss of monitoring and the constant warning about 'incompatible' disks).
I am stuck with the Proliants, possibly for another year or two, however our Software based SAN hardware is very ripe for replacement, so I would like to move to a hyper-converged solution with Storage Services Direct and using local SSD storage on these Clustered Virtual Hosts. I don't want to buy over-priced HP SSDs, not only because of the cost ( which I believe far outweigh any benefit of the better compatibility with HP servers), but I may want to re-use such SSDs in rolling replacement servers (which won't be HP) in the next year or so.
Am I being unrealistic here ? Ideally I would like to buy new servers too, but don't have the budget for that. Is it more trouble than it is worth ?
IS there a way to utilise the likes of M.2 PM/SM961's into a proliant – like a PCIe adapter card that would take 2 or three of them ?
Best Answer
Unfortunately, Storage Spaces Direct has hardware limitations which mean that even if you succeed with a workaround for this issue final configuration will not be supported anyway.
If Storage Spaces Direct is not mandatory you can use HPE's native hyper-converged solution https://www.hpe.com/emea_europe/en/storage/storevirtual.html that does basically the same but is more hardware-friendly or use a free alternative like Starwinds https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-san-free.