The folks over at SimplyNUC has recently launched an exciting new Edge-focused product line called the extremeEDGE (EE) Servers and I recently had the opportunity to try out their latest 3000 Series (3rd generation of their EE platform) in my homelab for some testing.
I recently helped a colleague who wanted to mark an HDD device in ESXi to show up as an SSD, which may be needed if the storage device was not correctly detected or if you are using Nested ESXi and the underlying storage is not an SSD and you need to mark it as an SSD for use with vSAN OSA or ESA.
The easiest way to accomplish this operation is by using the vSphere UI, but that does require vCenter Server to be up and running, which it was not. Alternatively, you can also perform this operation using ESXCLI and configure an Storage Array-Type Plugin (SATP) claim rules, which had been possible since 2013 but it looks like the old method no longer works in the latest ESXi 7.x and 8.x releases.
Note: If you are configuring this for a Nested ESXi VM, another method is to emulate a virtual SSD as shown in this blog post.
🆕 vSphere 8.0 Update 1c is now available! Includes support for TKr 1.25.7 🥳
📔RN
VC https://t.co/4y2s91PcKY
ESXi https://t.co/RYI0gz7vtf
TKr https://t.co/KiarKzkQs0💿 DL
VC https://t.co/w0cyBErTiC
ESXi https://t.co/MuCPqieXY3— William Lam (@lamw.bsky.social | @*protected email*) (@lamw) July 28, 2023
vSphere 8.0 Update 1c was just released and one of the resolved issues mentioned in the ESXi release notes is the following:
Nested virtual machines on AMD CPUs with operational systems such as Windows with virtualization-based security (VBS) might experience performance degradation, timeouts, or unresponsiveness due to an issue with the virtualization of AMD's Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI), also known as Nested Page Tables (NPT).
UPDATE (10/11/23) - This is also resolved in the ESXi 7.0 Update 3o release
There are two scenarios in which this fix resolves: