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
th
generation appliances use SATADOM, and the 14
th
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
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.
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.
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6 Boot devices