White Papers

Support for NVMe hot-plug on VMware vSphere 6.x and VMware vSAN 6.x
11 NVMe Hot-Plug on Dell EMC PowerEdge servers running VMware vSphere or vSAN | Technical white paper |
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Unmount the datastore
4. Perform hot removal of the NVMe device and check if the hot-plug slot is disabled. Use the lspci
command to check if the NVMe device exists in ESXi.
If there are no references to the specific NVMe device, then the NVMe device has been successfully
removed.
3.5 Perform orderly removal of an NVMe device through Dell EMC
iDRAC Service Module (iSM)
Dell EMC iDRAC Service Module (iSM) can be used to remove Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe)
Pheripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIE) Solid State Device (SSD) without powering off or
restarting the system.
When hot removal is performed, all the activities associated with the device must be stopped to prevent data
loss which can be achieved using the Prepare to Remove option from the Configuration tab in the iDRAC.
This allows the NVMe PCIe SSD to be safely removed.
Follow the steps:
1. Check the NVMe device usage from the ESXi using the command: esxcli storage core
device world list
2. List the VMFS extents available on the host using the command: esxcli storage vmfs extent
list
3. Make sure you have iSM installed on VMware ESXi. Use the command: esxcli software vib
list | grep dcism
4. Click on the Prepare to Remove option for the NVMe device to be removed. Go to iDRAC >
Configuration > Controller (CPU number) > Select the NVMe device from the drop-down menu.
Once the iDRAC notifies that the NVMe device is successfully removed, the device will no longer be utilized
by VMware ESXi. The device can be physically removed as it is not used by the filesystem.