Using Virtual NVMe With ESXi 6.5 and virtual machine Hardware Version 13 (2147714)

You can use an NVM Express (NVMe) controller with ESXi 6.5 and Hardware Version 13. NVMe is a logical device interface specification for accessing nonvolatile storage media attached through a PCI Express (PCIe) bus in real and virtual hardware. Virtual NVMe devices have reduced guest I/O processing overhead, which allows more VDI VMs per host and more transactions per minute. Each virtual machine supports 4 NVMe controllers and up to 15 devices per controller. With Hardware Version 13, you can use NVMe, SATA, SCSI, and IDE controllers in a virtual machine.

Solution

Verify that you have one of the following supported guest operating systems:

• Windows 7 and 2008 R2 (hot fix required: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2990941)
• Windows 8.1, 2012 R2, 10, 2016
• RHEL, CentOS, NeoKylin 6.5 and later
• Oracle Linux 6.5 and later
• Ubuntu 13.10 and later
• SLE 11 SP4 and later
• Solaris 11.3 and later
• FreeBSD 10.1 and later
• Mac OS X 10.10.3 and later
• Debian 8.0 and later

Note: The guest operating system requires a driver to use the NVMe controller. See the VMware Compatibility Guide to verify support.

You can determine whether the controller is configured in the virtual machine configuration file. NVMe-related entries are similar to SCSI-related entries.

For example:

Entry related to NVMe controller:

nvmeX.present = "TRUE"

Entry related to disk on NVMe controller:

nvmeX:Y.present = "TRUE"
nvmeX:Y.fileName = "disk.vmdk"

You can find all logs in the vmware.log file located in the virtual machine's home directory. These logs are prefixed with NVMe. For information about adding an NVMe controller, see "Add a NVMe Controller" in vSphere Virtual Machine Administration Guide.