ESXi 5.5 and vSphere support for Solid State Drives

[anthonyhelmey]

Are Solid State Drives supported in ESXi 5.5? vSphere is unable to locate the installed SSD to create a datastore.

The drive is connected to a Sabertooth Motherboard, via 6G SATA. The drive itself is a Samsung 256GB

Thanks

[anthonyhelmey]

Solved:

ESXi does not like 6G ports, i changed it to a 3G port and it worked.

[JarryG]

Wrong. ESXi DOES like 6gbit/s ports, but only those that are part of supported chipsets. Your motherboard is of desktop-type. Very probably it is not on VMware HCL and quite naturally, not all of its features are supported. You are lucky at least some ports work...

BTW are you aware of performance implications? With sata rev. 2.0 (3gbit) you can get theoretically ~300MB/s true pefromance (8/10bit encoding). But today's SSD can do much more. I do not know what Samsung SSD you use, but i.e. 840pro or 840evo can do >500MB/s in both reading and writing. Of course, only when attached to sata rev 3.0 (6gbit). If you attach such a SSD to sata 2.0 (3gbit), it is like artificial performance-brake...

[anthonyhelmey]

Unfortunately it is a Samsung 840 Pro. I should have corrected myself and said that ESXi did not like the 6G ports on the motherboard I am using, It also didnt like the onboard NIC. So i will lose a bit of read/write speed but hopefully that doesnt affect it much. The chipset supported it in windows. Well, it allowed a connection to the drive, unsure if it actually used the full 6Gbp/s speed. Any ideas on making it work on the 6G port?

[JarryG]

As I wrote, neither SSD nor ESXi is problem. So maybe it could help if you write which exactly Sabertooth motherboard you have. Asus makes many of them, for both AMD and Intel. But AFAIK all of them have two kinds of 6gbit/sata ports: those part of chipset, and those part of add-on chip. Those part of chipset (z87, x79, etc) should work...

[anthonyhelmey]

Sabertooth X79 Intel I7. I will try it again next time I take it offline, but when i was working on it i ran the esxcli storage core device list command and it didnt show the drive. I switched it to the 3G port and it didnt have a problem. It could have been something simple like power not connected fully.

[Rez58]

Hi

I have the same problem, my motherboard is sabertooth Z79 Mark 2 and I  have a 500GB Samsung S.S.D

how can I change the SATA port from 6G to 3G as work around to this problem?

Thank