VMware & NVMe drives

The VMware HCL (Hardware Compatibility List) has always been a problem for those of us on a tight IT budget; no matter if it is for a business or home-lab.  Turns out the selective approval of the HCL also applies to NVMe drives.  I have been a fan of using PCIe to NVMe adapters and a NVMe gum-stick drive in older hardware for higher IOPs loads, caching tier such as vSAN, or even just for swap space.  See some of my previous posts on this subject.

My last home-lab upgrade, I had allocated a specific NVMe drive to use because of the price and speed.   I couldn't get that drive to work.  I assumed it was because it was a Generation 4 drive and was just too new to use on my older HP G8.  An older enterprise drive was purchased second hand, that I knew from previous expirence would work   

Months later, almost the exact same issue cropped up on a Dell PowerEdge r730.  This time after some Google-Fu and reading William Lam's blog post it turns out the that the drive I was attempting to use simply wasn't in the HCL list, and therefore ESX was not going to accept it.

ESXi would see the memory controller, but not address the drive:

Running this command one would not see the device:

"esxcli storage core path list"

Also running this command, one would not see the device:

"esxcfg-scsidevs -l"

Running this command one could see the memory controller:

"esxcli hardware pci list"

In my case it saw the HP EX950 as:

   VMkernel Name: vmhba5

  Vendor Name: Silicon Motion, Inc.

   Device Name: SM2262/SM2262EN SSD Controller
   Configured Owner: VMkernel
   Current Owner: VMkernel
   Vendor ID: 0x126f
   Device ID: 0x2262
   SubVendor ID: 0x126f
   SubDevice ID: 0x2262
   Device Class: 0x0108
   Device Class Name: Non-Volatile memory controller

In the end the HP 950 NVMe drive was pulled out and a Kioxia KXG60ZNV256G which has a Toshiba brand controller was installed.  Things worked as expected.  

The forums did talk about replacing a driver with an older ond from ESXi v6.7.0, but I decided to avoid all that for fear of loosing access to the drive after various updates.

ALSO!  It turns out ESXi does not like drives that are formatted to 4k!  I had a drive that ESXi would see, but could not provision as storage.  Deleting the name space and recreating it formatted to 512b and it worked just fine.