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Creating a VMFS datastore greater than 2TB on a USB device in ESXi

02.04.2022 by William Lam // 12 Comments

I recently had an inquiry from one of our Technical Account Managers (TAM) with an interesting question from their customer. They were looking to manually migrate VMs from one environment to another and because these were isolated and secured environments, they were looking to use an encrypted USB device that would be formatted with VMFS. While researching this topic, they came across several mentions in the community that VMFS on USB has a 2TB limitation, which was not going to work for them.

I personally have never tried nor had the need to ever create a VMFS datastore that was greater than 2TB on a USB device, but I have certainly heard simliar claims in the past and this finally piqued my interests. I reached out to a few folks within VMware Engineering that works on our USB stack and came to learn that is no such limitation when using VMFS on USB. In fact, they also pointed out that some of the reported errors in the community was most likely due to hardware issues rather than capacity of the underlying USB device. This was actually great news and of course I wanted to verify for myself before replying back.

First off, VMFS on USB is NOT officially supported by VMware, so I just want to make sure that is clear. With that said, this is a fairly common practice within the community, especially for VMware Homelabs which I have also demonstrated this capability as early as 2011 and most recently in 2015 for use with vSAN and in 2020 for a vSAN Witness with ESXi on Arm. While most USB storage devices, especially those found in the consumer space are not durable enough for Enterprise usage, it does NOT mean you can not have a reliable USB storage device. I actually wrote about this topic a few years back where you can use inexpensive M.2 enclosures to house an NVMe device that can then be connected via USB/USB-C to have a more reliable storage medium that can also be cost effective.

[Read more...]

Categories // ESXi, Home Lab, vSphere Tags // usb, vmfs

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

06.03.2019 by William Lam // 15 Comments

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.

[Read more...]

Categories // ESXi, Home Lab, VSAN, vSphere Tags // homelab, M.2, NVMe, thunderbolt 3, vmfs, VSAN

Configure new automatic Space Reclamation (VMFS UNMAP) using vSphere 6.5 APIs

10.31.2016 by William Lam // 6 Comments

Since its first introduction in vSphere 5.5, VMFS UNMAP also know as Space Reclamation for a VMFS based datastore has been a pretty popular Storage capability in vSphere. A commonly asked question from customers is when will the "automatic" capability return? Well, it looks like it is now back in the upcoming vSphere 6.5 release as blogged about here by Duncan Epping. Below is a screenshot of where you can find the setting. VMFS UNMAP is now enabled by default and you will need to have a VMFS 6 datastore to take advantage of this new feature.

vmfs-unmap-vsphere-65-api-0
For customers who wish to automate the configuration of the VMFS UNAMP capability whether that is to check the current settings or to enable/disable it, there are some new vSphere 6.5 APIs that have been introduced which differ from the previous implementations. To change the VMFS UNMAP setting, there is a new vSphere API called UpdateVmfsUnmapPriority() which accepts the UUID of a VMFS 6 datastore as well as an unmapPriority property which can either be "low" which means it is enabled or "none" which means it is disabled. To view the current VMFS UNMAP settings, there is a new property under the Datastore->Info->Vmfs object called UnmapPriority.

To demonstrate this new vSphere API, I have created two small PowerCLI functions called Get-VMFSUnmap and Set-VMFSUnmap which can be downloaded from here.

Here is an example of retrieving the current VMFS UNMAP settings:

Get-Datastore "mini-local-datastore-hdd" | Get-VMFSUnmap

vmfs-unmap-vsphere-65-api-1
Here is an example of enabling automatic VMFS UNMAP setting:

Get-Datastore "mini-local-datastore-hdd" | Set-VMFSUnmap -Enabled $true

vmfs-unmap-vsphere-65-api-2

Categories // Automation, vSphere 6.5 Tags // PowerCLI, unmap, vmfs, vSphere 6.5, vSphere API

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William is Distinguished Platform Engineering Architect in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Division at Broadcom. His primary focus is helping customers and partners build, run and operate a modern Private Cloud using the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform.

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Recent

  • VMware Flings is now available in Free Downloads of Broadcom Support Portal (BSP) 05/19/2025
  • VMUG Connect 2025 - Minimal VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 5.x in a Box  05/15/2025
  • Programmatically accessing the Broadcom Compatibility Guide (BCG) 05/06/2025
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  • Supported chipsets for the USB Network Native Driver for ESXi Fling 04/23/2025

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