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Thunderbolt 3 enclosures with (Single, Dual & Quad) M.2 NVMe SSDs for ESXi

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Thunderbolt 3 (TB3) and eventually USB 4 is a really fascinating technology and I believe it still has so much untapped potential, especially when looking at Remote/Branch Office (ROBO), Edge and IoT types of deployments. TB3 was initially limited to Apple-based platforms, but in the last couple of years, adoption has been picking up across a number of PC desktop/laptops including the latest generations of Intel NUCs which are quite popular for vSphere/vSAN/NSX Home Labs. My hope with USB 4 is that in the near future, we will start to see servers with this interface show up in the datacenter 🙂

In the mean time, I have been doing some work with TB3 from a home lab standpoint. Some of you may have noticed my recent work on enabling Thunderbolt 3 to 10GbE for ESXi and it should be no surprise that the next logical step was TB3 storage. Using a Thunderbolt interface to connect to external storage, usually Fibre Channel is something many of our customers have been doing for quite some time. In fact, I have a blog post from a few years back which goes over some of the solutions customers have implemented, the majority use case being Virtualizing MacOS on ESXi for iOS/MacOS development. These solutions were usually not cheap and involved a sizable amount of infrastructure (e.g. storage arrays, network switches, etc) but worked very well for large vSphere/MacOS based environments.

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Quick Tip - Crucial NVMe SSD not recognized by ESXi 6.7 & 7.0

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If you own or have recently purchased Crucial NVMe SSD such as CT1000P1SSD8 (1TB M.2 NVMe SSD) or CT500P1SSD8 (500GB M.2 NVMe SSD), please be aware that these devices may no be recognized by ESXi after upgrading to the latest release. Thanks to Pete Lindley, (OCTO for End-User Computing), who reached out last week regarding the observation as well as a workaround for the problem. This was also quite timely as I recently purchased a Crucial M.2 NVMe SSD and would have also ran into this problem.

It turns out these Crucial devices were working fine while running on ESXi 6.5 Update 2 but was no longer recognized in latest release of ESXi 6.7 Update 2. It is unclear whether support for these SSDs were removed intentionally or unintentionally, but in either case, these devices are not officially on VMware's Hardware Compatibility List (HCL).

UPDATE (07/29/20) - Over the past few months, I have had a number of folks share feedback that using the trick mentioned below for ESXi 7.0, they have had success of ESXi detecting their NVMe SSD. I wanted to share some of the model and/or vendors that folks have reported success with. I will keep this list updated, so feel free to leave a comment below.

UPDATE (06/13/20) - Thanks to reader Dave, it looks like this trick also works with ESXi 7.0 but the filename has changed. Simply copy nvme.v00 VIB from the ESXi 6.5 Update 2 and replace it on ESXi 7.0 system (either live under /bootbank or part of the installer) but rename the file to nvme_pci.v00 which is the new filename for NVMe driver.

UPDATE (05/23/19) - After speaking with a few folks who took a closer look, the issue is due to the fact that we added support for NVMe 1.3 spec in latest ESXi 6.7 Update 2 release, but because these are "consumer" devices, they did not conform to the latest specification and hence the driver is unable to claim the device. This is another good reminder when using components not on VMware HCL, this is always a risk from a home lab perspective. In general, I know Samsung and Intel NVMe SSD usually works quite well without issues but always good to do some research. I think Engineering is looking to see if there are other workarounds for the future, but for now, you can use the workaround below.

The easy workaround that Pete found was to simply replace the NVMe driver from ESXi 6.7 Update 2 (1.2.2.27-1vmw.670.2.48.13006603) with one found in ESXi 6.5 Update 2 (1.2.1.34-1vmw.650.2.50.8294253). To so do, simply copy nvme.v00 to /bootbank from either an existing ESXi 6.5 Update 2 system or directly from the ISO. Please note, any future updates or patches to the ESXi host will most likely override the updated driver.

New Thunderbolt 3 to 10GbE options for ESXi

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With the help from Aquantia, we now have an ESXi driver to enable the built-in 10GbE adaptor for both the Apple 2018 Mac Mini and the iMac Pro. Although this was exciting news for our VMware/Apple customers, I was actually more excited for what this development meant for the larger VMware Community when it comes to 10GbE accessibility.

Many Enterprise customers have already been using Thunderbolt 2/3 to access their 10 Gigabit infrastructure, usually over SFP+ but Ethernet based options also exists such as the Sonnet solution which I had shared last year. This is especially common for VMware customers who virtualize Apple MacOS on vSphere for MacOS/iOS development and the use of Thunderbolt enables ESXi to connect to the underlying storage and networking infrastructure, which traditionally has been either Fibre Channel and/or IP-based storage running over a 10Gig link.

When you start looking at 10GbE accessibility for VMware home labs which could potentially apply to remote office/branch office (ROBO) and Edge/IoT environments, the cost and the complexity of the setup is something that many folks have to consider. There are definitely some creative options out there, most recently Chad Moon shared his solution using a Thunderbolt 3 to PCIe expansion chassis with his Intel NUCs which will run you about $230 per setup or you can be a true hardware hacker like Jack Harvest and use one of the M.2 slots in the Intel Skull Canyon NUC and connect that to PCIe 10GbE SFP+ card with a custom 3D printed chassis to hide everything for just $43.68 🙂

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