Mark an SSD in your virtualized vSphere lab

In my lab I have a bunch of virtualized ESXi hosts. Those hosts have multiple disks and I want to mark one of those disks as SSD. To keep things simple I set things up as follows. Just to point out, I use 0:0 / 1:0 / 2:0 so that each device gets a new controller and is easy to identifiy:

• First Disk – ESXi install disk – 5GB – SCSI 0:0
• Second Disk – Fake SSD – 40GB – SCSI 1:0
• Third Disk – Large disk – 1TB – SCSI 2:0

When I boot all disks are recognized as regular disks and in some cases as non-local. In my testing I need local disks and need SSD. So this is what I did to get exactly that. With the first command I mark the “second disk” as SSD and local. With the second command I mark the third disk as local. Next I reclaim the devices so that the new SATP rules are applied.

esxcli storage nmp satp rule add --satp VMW_SATP_LOCAL --device mpx.vmhba2:C0:T0:L0 --option "enable_local enable_ssd"
esxcli storage nmp satp rule add --satp VMW_SATP_LOCAL --device mpx.vmhba3:C0:T0:L0 --option "enable_local"
esxcli storage core claiming reclaim -d mpx.vmhba2:C0:T0:L0
esxcli storage core claiming reclaim -d mpx.vmhba3:C0:T0:L0

Next you can simply validate if it has worked by typing the following for device vmhba2 and 3 (if you replace the 2 with a 3 ofcourse) :

esxcli storage core device list --device=mpx.vmhba2:C0:T0:L0

As you can see, faking an SSD is fairly straight forward. Note that even if you have an SSD drive you still might need to do this. In some cases the SSD drive is not recognized and you will need to create a rule for it manually.