vSphere Storage - ESXi 5.1 - Documentation - VMware

Solid State Disks Enablement 16
In addition to regular hard disk drives, ESXi supports Solid State Disks (SSDs).
Unlike the regular hard disks that are electromechanical devices containing moving parts, SSDs use
semiconductors as their storage medium and have no moving parts.
On several storage arrays, the ESXi host can automatically distinguish SSDs from traditional hard disks. To
tag the SSD devices that are not detected automatically, you can use PSA SATP claim rules.
This chapter includes the following topics:
n “Benefits of SSD Enablement,” on page 145
n “Auto-Detection of SSD Devices,” on page 146
n “Tag Devices as SSD,” on page 146
n “Untag an SSD Device,” on page 147
n “Untag an Automatically Detected SSD Device,” on page 148
n “Tag Devices as Local,” on page 149
n “Monitor SSD Devices,” on page 150
n “Identify SSD Devices,” on page 150
n “Identifying a Virtual SSD Device,” on page 150
n “Best Practices for SSD Devices,” on page 151
Benefits of SSD Enablement
SSDs are very resilient and provide faster access to data.
SSD enablement results in several benefits:
n It enables usage of SSD as swap space for improved system performance. For information about using
SSD datastores to allocate space for host cache, see the vSphere Resource Management documentation.
n It increases virtual machine consolidation ratio as SSDs can provide very high I/O throughput.
n It supports identification of virtual SSD device by the guest operating system.
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