We have an exciting update for the VMware Community today with the release of the Community NVMe Driver for ESXi Fling v1.1. After the release of ESXi 6.7, a number of consumer NVMe devices were no longer bering detected which had previously worked with ESXi 6.5.
One workaround that many folks had to implement, including myself, was to replace the 6.7 NVMe driver. with the previous 6.5 version of the NVMe driver. Although this method still works with the latest ESXi 7.0 Update 2, it is less than ideal as you are using an extremely old version of the NVMe driver and you are giving up new NVMe device enablement, bug fixes and enhancements with the latest version of the driver.
Given the amount of comments and feedback that I had received in the previous blog post, I wanted to explore a way in which we can enable some of these consumer NVMe devices for the community. With the help from Yibo, we have updated the Community NVMe Driver for ESXi Fling to include support for the following storage devices:
| VendorName | VendorId | DeviceId |
|---|---|---|
| ADATA | 0x1cc1 | 0x8201 |
| Micro/Crucial | 0xc0a9 | 0x2263 |
| Silicon Motion/Transcend | 0x126f | 0x2262 |
With this update, we have also added support for ESXi 7.0 or greater when using the new driver which should hopefully be a welcome update for VMware Homelabs!
Here is a screenshot of my Intel NUC 9 running ESXi 7.0 Update 2 which now recognizes my Crucial 1TB NVMe (CT1000P1SSD8)
To help others in the community, if folks want to share the specific brand and model of their NVMe device that can now be enabled by the new driver, feel free to leave a comment. Other consumer NVMe devices may be considered in the future, but will soley be based on feedback from the community. If your particular NVMe device is not being picked up, please share the vendor/device ID by using lspci -v command on ESXi Shell.
Oooh, this is awesome. Excellent work team.
Now if Realtek could come to the party and make a native driver for their NICs.
Will this fling support Patriot 512GB NMVe module? I have 4 of them in 4 different ESXi boxes and had to downgrade to the 6.5 driver to make it work.
Take a look at the Vendor/DeviceID as mentioned in blog post to see if your device is included 🙂
unbelievable - I really appreciate the effort you put into making this work again! Great to be able to update properly again 🙂
Thanks for the great update!
It worked fine with the ESXi 7.0u2 and Transcend NVMe SSD.
Driver :
nvme-community-driver_1.0.1.0-2vmw.700.1.0.15843807-component-18290856.zip
Tested SSD :
Transcend PCIe SSD 220S TS2TMTE220S
* controller: Silicon Motion, VID:0x126f, PID:2262
----
[[email protected]:~] lspci -v
0000:3a:00.0 Mass storage controller Non-Volatile memory controller: Silicon Motion, Inc. Device 2262 [vmhba1]
Class 0108: 126f:2262
[[email protected]:~] vdq -q
[
{
"Name" : "t10.NVMe____TS2TMTE220S_____________________________G095430113__________00000001",
"VSANUUID" : "",
"State" : "Ineligible for use by VSAN",
"Reason" : "Has partitions",
"IsSSD" : "1",
"IsCapacityFlash": "0",
"IsPDL" : "0",
"Size(MB)" : "1953514",
"FormatType" : "512e",
"IsVsanDirectDisk" : "0",
},
]
PLEXTOR PX-2TM10PY
0000:02:00.0 Mass storage controller Non-Volatile memory controller: Vendor 1e95 Device 1005 [vmhba1]
Class 0108: 1e95:1005