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Sharing a single NVMe device with NVMe Tiering, ESXi-OSDATA & VMFS Datastore? 

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With the ability to to share a single NVMe device for both NVMe Tiering and a local VMFS datastore ... I had an idea to push this further and see if I could also get an ESXi-OSData partition running on the same shared NVMe device! 🤔

Simliar to the previous blog post, the underlying use case is really for dev/test environment where you may not have a ton of NVMe devices to dedicate to the various ESXi functions, especially true for those using small form factor (SFF) systems like an ASUS NUC or simliar. Most of the mainstream SFF systems usually comes with two, maybe three NVMe slots if you are lucky.

This technique would allow you to boot ESXi off of USB and then have key functions like ESXi-OSData and NVMe Tiering on a single shared NVMe while freeing up the other NVMe devices for use with vSAN, which you should have dedicated devices for whether you are considering vSAN OSA or ESA.

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware, please use at your own risk.

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Sharing a single NVMe device with NVMe Tiering? 

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I am a huge fan of the new NVMe Tiering capability within vSphere 8.0 Update 3 and it has been fantastic to hear more users taking advantage of this new feature to see what it can do for their homelab/development setup but also for their various production workloads.

As of right now, enabling NVMe Tiering requires a dedicated NVMe device, which for a production system is probably acceptable as you will probably want to ensure there are no other workloads competing for IO on the NVMe device. However, for a development environment or homelab, this can be challenge due to number of available NVMe devices that can be used.

Thank you to fellow reader Andrea T, for sharing this awesome tidbit with the community and how you CAN actually share a single NVMe device with NVMe Tiering! 😍

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