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do you require any additional help, to close and select a solution ?

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We have a Dell R730 server with two NVMe cards that we want to use in a RAID for redundancy. &nbsp;We have VMware 6.5 installed to the server, with a Windows Server 2016 VM installed on a local datastore. &nbsp;We found that the RAID controller on the server cannot connect to the NVMe cards, and we can present each NVMe card as a separate datastore within ESX, but that does not provide any redundancy for storage. <br />
<br />
And it doesn't look possible to provide a virtual disk on each NVMe to the Windows VM guest with a software RAID within the VM guest.<br />
<br />
It looks like our only option to provide redundancy with the NVMe cards is to install Windows directly to the physical server and configure a software RAID 1 within Windows between the NVMe cards. &nbsp;For ESX, we would have to go the vSAN route where we utilize the NVMe cards as cache.<br />
<br />
Are we missing anything? &nbsp;Is there an option to provide a RAID 1 with the NVMe cards without installing Windows to the physical server?
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We have a Dell R730 server with two NVMe cards that we want to use in a RAID for redundancy.  We have VMware 6.5 installed to the server, with a Windows Server 2016 VM installed on a local datastore.  We found that the RAID controller on the server cannot connect to the NVMe cards, and we can present each NVMe card as a separate datastore within ESX, but that does not provide any redundancy for storage. 

And it doesn't look possible to provide a virtual disk on each NVMe to the Windows VM guest with a software RAID within the VM guest.

It looks like our only option to provide redundancy with the NVMe cards is to install Windows directly to the physical server and configure a software RAID 1 within Windows between the NVMe cards.  For ESX, we would have to go the vSAN route where we utilize the NVMe cards as cache.

Are we missing anything?  Is there an option to provide a RAID 1 with the NVMe cards without installing Windows to the physical server?

Dell R730 NVMe Raid Options

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Dell is in Enterprise, Home Office and Consumer sectors of the market, supplying a broad range of customizable desktops, laptops, notebooks, servers, storage, and network devices.

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RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks.

RAID is data storage technology that allows multiple drives to be used together as a single virtual drive for reasons such as fault tolerance, reliability and performance. 

There are several different levels of RAID that determine how the data is stored and the level of redundancy achieved across the drives.

RAID

VMware, a software company founded in 1998,  was one of the first commercially successful companies to offer x86 virtualization. The storage company EMC purchased VMware in 1994. Dell Technologies acquired EMC in 2016. VMware’s parent company is now Dell Technologies.

VMware has many software products that run on desktops, Microsoft Windows, Linux, and macOS, which allows the virtualizing of the x86 architecture.  Its enterprise software hypervisor for servers, VMware vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi), is a bare-metal hypervisor that runs directly on the server hardware and does not require an additional underlying operating system.

VMware

Computer data storage, often called storage or memory, is a technology consisting of computer components and recording media used to retain digital data. In addition to local storage devices like CD and DVD readers, hard drives and flash drives, solid state drives can hold enormous amounts of data in a very small device. Cloud services and other new forms of remote storage also add to the capacity of devices and their ability to access more data without building additional data storage into a device.