Users Guide
Table Of Contents
- Dell EMC NVDIMM-N Persistent Memory User Guide
- Introduction
- Change list
- NVDIMM-N Overview
- Hardware
- BIOS
- iDRAC NVDIMM-N Management
- Server Behavior with NVDIMM-Ns
- DIMM Configuration Changes
- Windows
- Linux
- ESXi
- General Errata
Windows
Topics:
• BIOS Requirements
•
Set Up
• Windows Drivers
• Storage Class Memory in Windows Server 2016
• Storage Class Memory in Windows Server 2019
• Windows Errata
BIOS Requirements
Both Windows 2016 and 2019 require the minimum BIOS version to be at 1.6.13 so that NVDIMM-N modules can be used
without any issues.
Set Up
Windows Server 2016 and 2019 natively supports NVDIMM-N devices allowing application and service access to extremely high
performance and low latency NVDIMM-N devices on memory bus.
From BIOS Setup, enable the Persistence Memory setting, which is also the default BIOS settings when NVDIMM-N devices are
plugged in. Windows Server 2016 and Windows 10 Anniversary Edition currently do not support interleaved sets of NVDIMM-Ns
and the NVDIMM-N Interleave setting should be set to Disable, which is the default setting.
Windows Server 2019 supports NVDIMM-N interleaving and this option can be set to Enable.
2017-07 Cumulative Update for Windows Server 2016 for x64-based Systems (KB4025334) is required for NVDIMM-N to
function correctly in Windows Server 2016.
Windows Drivers
Windows refers “Storage Class Memory (SCM) “as persistent storage that is directly installed on the memory bus. NVDIMM-N
is a form of Storage class memory.
DellEMC PowerEdge platforms implement NVDIMM-N root device using PNP ID “ACPI0012”, this root device contains individual
NVDIMM-N devices. During boot process windows loads “Storage Class memory bus driver (Scmbus.sys) for this root device.
Scmbus.sys driver enumerates each NVDIMM-N device in the system and loads scmdisk0101.sys as functional driver for each
NVDIMM-N device.
DellEMC NVDIMM-N in Windows Server 2016 and 2019 environment can support both block mode and direct access mode
(DAX) mode. The following two videos describe the difference between these two modes and how use each mode.
● Using Non-volatile Memory (NVDIMM-N) as Block Storage
https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2016/P466
● Using Non-volatile Memory (NVDIMM-N) as Byte-Addressable Storage
https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2016/P470
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