Dedicated drives for LVM filesystems

You need dedicated drives for Logical Volume Manager (LVM) filesystems to host control planes. The NVMe drives must be allocated to IBM Fusion HCI with Fusion Data Foundation storage.

Key considerations for dedicated drives for LVM filesystems:
  • Ordering guidance:
    • You can order these LVM drives of 1.6 TB and add them to a new rack configuration or MES to a pre-ordered rack. By default, when it comes in a new rack, the LVM drive is placed in bay 9.
    • If your earlier IBM Fusion HCI order did not include LVM drives, you can submit a MES order to add them.
    • The MES kit delivers NVMe drives that must be placed in bay 9 of any three compute-only or compute-storage nodes, with a maximum of one drive per node.
  • Rack placement guidance for stand-alone and multi-rack:
    • If you select the LVM drives option, it is not possible to add more than 9 NVMe drives to storage nodes in the rack. Racks that have 10 NVMe drives in each of the storage nodes are not supported.
    • In high-availability (HA) multi-rack system, drives must be distributed across one compute or compute-storage node per rack, spanning three racks, to ensure resiliency.
    • The LVM drives for hosted control plane must not be placed on control nodes or GPU nodes.
    • When you place them in any three compute nodes, the IBM Fusion HCI automatically detects the presence of the control plane drives and configures them for LVM.