Specification

Boot devices
5 Dell EMC Best Practices for Running VMware ESXi 6.5 or Later Clusters on XC Series Appliances and XC Core
Systems | A03
1 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
th
generation appliances use SATADOM, and the 14
th
generation appliances use BOSS. Use Table 1 to
determine which boot device is on your appliance.
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
1.1 Essential information about the boot devices
Dell EMC XC Series Appliances and XC Core Systems differ between 13
th
and 14
th
generation appliances.
The 13
th
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
th
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.
1.2 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.