Tag Storage Devices as SSD in VMware

You can use PSA (Plug-gable Storage Architecture) SATP (Storage Array Type Plug-Ins) claim rules for this task and only the devices that are consumed by the PSA NMP (Native Multipathing) can only be tagged in this method.  If you need to read more about PSA and NMP you can read from this kb article.

First of all I would like to show my VMware lab Datastores and all the datastores shows as “Non-SSD” datastores.

You can verify this whether this datastore device is detecting as SSDs from the command line

SSH in to one of your ESXi host and type ” esxcli storage core device list” command and verify the SSD device status (Note: This is an output for eui.3fca7e21c5941116 and I’m going to tag eui.2de85804589092cd device, this is a sample output and you need to identify the correct device from the device ID).

In my case datastore which I’m going to manually tag as SSD shows as “Is SSD: false” state

Type ” esxcli storage nmp device list ” to Identify the SATP plugin of the device, in my case SATP plugin is ” VMW_SATP_DEFAULT_AA ”

The next step is to add a PSA claim rule to mark the device as SSD.

Type: esxcli storage nmp satp rule add -s <your storage array type> –device <device id> –option=enable_ssd

Now unclaim the device

Type: esxcli storage core claiming unclaim –type device –device <device id>

Reclaim the device using load and run command

Check the SSD status of the device

Type: esxcli storage core device list -d <device id>

Now check the status in vSphere console, you can see the Datastore as a SSD datastore

So now we successfully tagged the Storage Device as a SSD device.