Reference Guide

Boot devices

The Dell EMC XC Series Appliances and XC Core Systems support either SATADOM or BOSS (PCIe cards M.2 Drive) as its boot device.

The boot device depends on the generation of your appliance.

The 13

generation appliances use SATADOM, and the 14

generation appliances use BOSS. Use the below table to determine which

boot device is on your appliance.

Table 1. Associated boot drives per appliance

Appliance Boot drive

XC430 SATADOM

XC630 SATADOM

XC6320 SATADOM

XC730 SATADOM

XC730xd SATADOM

XC640 BOSS

XC740xd BOSS

XC940 BOSS

XC6420 BOSS

Essential information about the boot devices

Dell EMC XC Series Appliances and XC Core Systems differ between 13

and 14

generation appliances.

The 13

generation appliances come with a Serial ATA Disk on Motherboard (SATADOM), which is a flash memory drive designed for use

as a boot drive on XC series platforms. While flash memory provides many benefits, it has a finite number of program-erase (P/E) cycles

you must consider.

The 14

generation appliances come with a Boot Optimized Server Storage (BOSS) card as the appliance boot device. This PCIe card

supports up to two M.2 SATA SSDs configured in RAID1 for high availability.

Both the SATADOM and BOSS cards are designed as appliance boot devices only. Write intensive activities and processes that are

leveraged by the Dell EMC XC Series Appliances and XC Core Systems are intended to take place on the SSDs and HDDs, not the boot

device itself.

NOTE:

The boot device is not intended for application use. Write intensive activities and processes that are leveraged by

Dell EMC XC Series Appliances and XC Core Systems are intended to take place on the SSDs and HDDs and not the

SATADOM or BOSS boot devices. Any applications defaulting write activity to the BOSS boot drive should be redirected

accordingly.

Run virtual machines on the Nutanix Distributed

File System only

The boot device is slower performing and more limited in space than the XC Series hosts' SSDs and HDDs used for the highly available

Nutanix Distributed File System (NDFS) clustered storage.

Virtual Machines (VMs) run on the boot device are not highly available and potentially fill up the local boot drive, which results in crashing

the host hypervisor. This adds additional wear on the boot device.

NOTE: The Nutanix Cluster Checker (NCC) v. 2.2.2 and later will monitor for VMs running on the boot device.

6 Boot devices