Gen10 - SFF Expansion Bays - BOOTABLE?

[durried]

HI all,

I want to make a small business Hyper-V server out of a new HPE DL360 Gen10.

Gen10 servers now have various additional drive cage \ expansion slots. Can anyone confirm if the below is possible and will work? My supplier are annoyingly unable to confirm this?

Bill of materials to include...

1. DL360 Server
2. HPE Smart Array P408i-p controller
3. DL360 Gen10 2SFF SAS/SATA backplane Kit
4. 2x SAS drives to go into above kit slots

Can I then create a RAID 1 out of the 2x SAS drives in the expansion kit, make the volume bootablre and install Hyper-V on it?

Using HPE-OneConfig website the bill of mateirals all work out together and no config errors are thrown but I need to be sure I can RAID1 and make a bootable partition out of the expansion slot drives.

This leaves a full 8x SAS drives available purely for VM storage...

As always...thanks in advance...

durrie.

[Kittenbelt68]

Hi Durried,

As i understand that you want to install 2 drives in the rear cage ( 2 drive cage) and 8 SAS drive in the front drive cage ,later configure Raid1 using the 2 rear drives, install OS with HyperV config.
Rest of the 8 drives can be used with raid 5 or 6 ( as per demand) for data storage.
The above config is possible.  You just need to select raid1 volume during OS installation. 

Regards

sr

[durried]

Hi Kittenbelt68,

Thank you so much for the info,

I was planning on using a front expansion bay cage not the rear cage...these days optical drives are pretty useless so I wanted to replace the optical bay with the 2xSFF expansion bay...as seen below circled in red...

My main concern here is which controller models are required to allow which types of expansion bays to work because the HPE OneConfigurator website always throws an error in config for more than 8 drives unless the HPE Smart Array P408i-p controller is specified...however...

My suppliers keep quoting me on the standard P408i-a controller?