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Support for NVMe hot-plug on VMware vSphere 6.x and VMware vSAN 6.x
8 NVMe Hot-Plug on Dell EMC PowerEdge servers running VMware vSphere or vSAN | Technical white paper |
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3 Support for NVMe hot-plug on VMware vSphere 6.x and
VMware vSAN 6.x
VMware introduced support for surprise removal on NVMe devices from VMware ESXi 7.0 onwards. Surprise
removal of NVMe is not supported in the previous versions of VMware ESXi when the NVMe device is in use.
For more infomration, see VMware Knowledge Base article 2151404. Surprise removal of NVMe devices
when they are in use is not supported by Dell EMC and VMware. The user should instead perform orderly
removal. The following section describes the directions for performing an orderly removal of an NVMe device
in the various VMware use cases.
3.1 Perform orderly removal of an NVMe device configured as a VMFS
Datastore
Follow the steps:
1. Identify the virtual machines or processes which are accessing the NVMe device. Use the command:
esxcli storage core device world list to see all processes and use filter to find the
specific NVMe device.
2. Use the following command to set the autoclaim rescan to false to prevent devices from being re-
detected:
esxcli storage core claiming autoclaim –enabled=false
Checking the status of the filesystem mount
3. Check the status of the filesystem mount using the command: esxcli storage filesystem
list
4. Power off any virtual machine using the VMFS Datastore. Orderly removal will fail if any virtual
machine is using the VMFS Datastore.
Unmount the VMFS Datastores on the NVMe device
5. Unmount the VMFS Datastores on the NVMe device using the command: esxcli storage
filesystem unmount -l NVMeDS
6. Detach the NVMe device using the command:
esxcli storage core device set --state=off -d <nvme device name>