Best way to mirror NVMe drives for Windows VM with MSSQL database

HemaN

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Feb 27, 2025
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I built a server mainly for Windows VM with MSSQL database. Spec of my server:

1. Supermicro MBD-X13SCH-F-O,
2. Xeon E2468,
3. 64 GB DDR5 ECC memory from which 32 GB are attached to Windows 11 VM,
4. 2 x DC600M 480 GB for Proxmox
4. 2 x PM9A3 960 GB for mirror passedthrough to Windows VM,
5. Proxmox 8.2.2.

When I was assembling server one of PM9A3's was damaged out of the box, so I had to sent it to RMA. I couldn't wait for it, becouse I had to deploy the server. So after I received new PM9A3 started to figure out how to make a mirror on production enviroument without stopping services. I created mirrored dynamic volumes in Windows, but it turns out that Synology Active Backup for Business is not supporting dynamic mirrored volumes and I'm not able to create backups of whole VM to my Synology backup server.

So now I'm looking for best way to mirror two PM9A3's. First thought was to mirror two disk in UEFI and then passthrough entire NVMe controller to Windows VM, but I can't find NVMe controller on PCI-E devices list for passthrough. There is a lot of not described Intel devices:

PCI-E list.png
Is there a way to find out which one is NVMe controller or I have to passthrough all of them to VM and then disabling one by one until Windows won't boot? But some of them might be neccessery fo Proxmox itself and its not good idea to passthrough all of them.

I would like to avoid creating ZFS storage in Proxmox and then place whole VM on that pool as it adding another unnessery layer (NTFS on top of the ZFS).
 
First thought was to mirror two disk in UEFI and then passthrough entire NVMe controller t
AFAIK, they are no way to mirror nvme at hardware level, because they are no nvme controller(or "raid controller" like for sata/sas).
each nvme drive is like a pci device.
So you need to do passthrough 2disks and do softraid inside windows.
(Personnaly, I trust more zfs than windows to manage raid ;)
 
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Ok, thanks. That means I have to do ZFS mirror on two NVMe drives and do NTFS over ZFS. Hope it won't have a major impact on performance.