Hardware Setup
This page covers the physical setup of a Mango BoostX™ NRT enclosure: populating the NVMe drives, cabling the network port, and reaching the card for management. Once these steps are complete, proceed to Software Setup to verify the installation and configure the network address.
NVMe Drive Population
Mango BoostX™ NRT operates as the PCIe root complex for the NVMe SSDs in the enclosure and serves up to 26 SSDs. Each SSD is published as one namespace, so the drive count is also the number of namespaces the enclosure exports.
Note the following when selecting drives:
- The card uses a 512-byte logical block size. Drives formatted with a different logical block size are not served.
- SSDs may be added while the appliance is running. The configuration daemon re-scans the bus periodically and exports a newly inserted drive without a restart. See SSD Discovery.
Only healthy drives should be installed. The configuration daemon skips a drive that the kernel already reports I/O errors for, but that screening is best-effort — see Troubleshooting.
Supported NVMe Vendors
SSDs are qualified by vendor. Any model and any capacity from the vendors below can be served, provided it meets the logical block size requirement above. A drive from a vendor that is not listed cannot be attached to the target.
| Vendor | PCI Vendor ID |
|---|---|
| Intel | 0x8086 |
| Kioxia | 0x1e0f |
| Micron | 0x1344 |
| Phison | 0x1987 |
| Samsung | 0x144d |
| SanDisk | 0x15b7 |
| ScaleFlux | 0xcc53 |
| SK hynix | 0x1c5c |
| Solidigm | 0x025e |
| Western Digital | 0x1b96 |
The vendor IDs are the values to use if you restrict discovery to specific vendors with allowed_vendors in the policy file. See SSD Discovery.
Network Port and Cabling
The card provides a single QSFP-DD port operating at 200GbE, and supports both active and passive cables.
Because the appliance serves NVMe over RoCEv2, the switch port it connects to must carry RoCEv2 traffic to the initiators. Configure the switch port for 200GbE, and confirm the link comes up before configuring the appliance address.
Ethernet Cable Compatibility
The following Ethernet cables have been verified for use with Mango BoostX™ NRT.
| Vendor | Model / Part Number | Type |
|---|---|---|
| Accelight | KQD401C18509S10 | AOC |
| Dell | DAC-Q56DD-2Q56-SFF-200G-3M | DAC |
| Dell | CN-0PP10W-BLKR7-3BI-0082-A00 | AEC |
| Dell | CNN07GGV6-BBLKR7-45J-XXXX-A00 | AEC |
| FS | C2506658246 | DAC |
| Innolight | T-DQ8FNS-N00 | AOC |
| NADDOD | Q2Q56-400G-A5 | AOC |
| Optomind | T8R4NHGA000AG3 | AOC |
MTU
Use an Ethernet MTU of 4500 bytes. This is the only MTU the appliance is qualified for.
Do not run the link at a lower MTU. Smaller frames make throughput fluctuate and the connection unstable, and the symptom looks like a performance problem rather than a configuration one.
Set the same MTU on every device in the path (initiator NICs, switches, routers). A mismatch causes fragmentation or packet drops, which again appear as unstable throughput rather than as a link failure.
Management Access
The card exposes the following management interfaces:
- PCIe in-band management
- MCTP over SMBus
- FRU (Field Replaceable Unit)
- UART
The address the appliance serves on is not set through these interfaces. It comes from the policy file that the configuration daemon applies at boot, as described in Software Setup → Network Configuration.