Intel® Virtual RAID on CPU (Intel® VROC) is an enterprise RAID solution that unleashes the performance of NVMe SSDs. Intel® VROC is enabled by a feature in Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors called Intel® Volume Management Device (Intel® VMD), an integrated controller inside the CPU PCIe root complex. Intel® VMD isolates SSD error and event handling from the operating system to help reduce system crashes and reboots. NVMe SSDs are directly connected to the CPU, allowing the full performance potential of fast storage devices, such as Intel® Optane™ SSDs, to be realized. Intel® VROC enables these benefits without the complexity, cost, and power consumption of traditional hardware RAID host bus adapter (HBA) cards placed between the drives and the CPU.
Features of VROC include:
- Enterprise reliability: Increased protection from data loss and corruption in various failure scenarios such as unexpected power loss, even when a volume is degraded.
- Extended Management Tools: Pre-OS and OS management includes HII, CLI, email alerts, and a Windows GUI, all supporting NVMe and SATA controls.
- Integrated caching: Intel® VROC Integrated Caching allows easy addition of a Intel® Optane™ SSD caching layer to accelerate RAID storage arrays.
- Boot RAID: Redundancy for OS images directly off the CPU with pre-OS configuration options for platform set-up.
- High performance storage: Connect NVMe SSDs directly to the CPU for full bandwidth storage connections.
Intel VROC support the below three sets that requires a licensing mechanism to activate:
- Intel VROC Standard
- Intel VROC Premium
- Intel VROC Intel SSD Only
The VROC feature debuted in 2017 to simplify and reduce the cost of high-performance storage arrays, and it has enjoyed broad uptake in enterprise applications. The feature brings NVMe RAID functionality on-die to the CPU for SSD storage devices, thus providing many of the performance, redundancy, bootability, manageability, and serviceability benefits that were previously only accessible with an additional device, like a RAID card or HBA. Thus, VROC gives users a host of high-performance storage features without the added cost, power consumption, heat, and complexity of another component, like a RAID card or HBA, in the chassis — not to mention extra cabling.
In order to have VROC work on a system, the requirements were something like:
- Intel Xeon Scalable (Skylake or newer) system with BIOS support for Intel VMD
- The motherboard needs a header for the VROC hardware key
- A VROC hardware key needs to be installed with the correct level of functionality you want