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Support for NVMe hot-plug on VMware vSphere 6.x and VMware vSAN 6.x
9 NVMe Hot-Plug on Dell EMC PowerEdge servers running VMware vSphere or vSAN | Technical white paper |
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7. Remove the NVMe device physically.
Check VMFS Datastore is not connected to the ESXi
8. Make sure the VMFS Datastore is not connected to the ESXi using the command: esxcli storage
filesystem list
The NVMe device has been safely removed from VMware ESXi and the server. It is now safe to replace the
NVMe device with a different device or hot insert the same NVMe device if required. When performing hot
insert to an NVMe device, follow the attached operations and set autoclaim to true. For more information, see
VMware Knowledge Base article 2151404.
3.2 Perform orderly removal of an NVMe device configured as an RDM
disk
Follow the steps:
1. Check the NVMe device usage using the command: esxcli storage core device world
list
2. The output must show the world or process name for the specific device name.
Check the world or process name for the NVMe device name
3. Perform orderly removal of the NVMe device by first unmapping the NVMe device or power off the
virtual machine itself.
4. Perform hot remove on 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.
Note: If a different NVMe device is inserted back into the system after the hot removal, then the RDM link
configured to the virtual machine will not be available automatically. The user needs to re-create RDM and
point to the VM manually.