I’ve recently been working with a few new ESXi hosts. These systems have a pair of solid state disks that I planned to use for host cache. However, ESXi 5.0 did not detect these disks as an SSD type. I found a couple articles describing how to trick ESXi into thinking a data store was SSD:
Yellow-Bricks: Swap to host cache aka swap to SSD
VirtuallyGhetto: How to Trick ESXi 5 in seeing an SSD Datastore
After confirming with my third party vendors that this was a supported configuration, I tested and confirmed that using the enable_ssd option would resolve my issues. Since my host build script is written in PowerCLI, I wanted to re-write the vMA commands using Get-EsxCli.
1 2 3 4 5 6 | $localDisk = Get-ScsiLun | where {$_.ExtensionData.DisplayName -match "Local LSI Disk"} $canName = $localDisk.CanonicalName $esxcli = Get-EsxCli $satp = ($esxcli.storage.nmp.device.list() | where {$_.Device -eq $canName }).StorageArrayType $esxcli.storage.nmp.satp.rule.add($null,$null,$null,$canname,$null,$null,$null,"enable_ssd",$null,$null,$satp,$null,$null,$null) $esxcli.storage.core.claiming.reclaim($canName) |
The local VMFS data store needs to be created first. I encountered some errors when running the commands against an unformatted/RAW device.
[...] Brian Wuchner article on how to do this through PowerCLI - http://enterpriseadmins.org/blog/scripting/use-powercli-to-mark-disk-as-as-ssd/ Joe Keegan has developed a couple of nice PowerCLI scripts to make using this with Host Caching [...]