vsphere-esxi-vcenter-server-55-storage-guide

Solid State Disks Enablement 18In 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 usesemiconductors as their storage medium and have no moving parts.On several storage arrays, the ESXi host can automatically distinguish SSDs from traditional hard disks. Totag the SSD devices that are not detected automatically, you can use PSA SATP claim rules.This chapter includes the following topics:• “Benefits of SSD Enablement,” on page 163• “Auto-Detection of SSD Devices,” on page 164• “Tag Devices as SSD,” on page 164• “Untag an SSD Device,” on page 165• “Untag an Automatically Detected SSD Device,” on page 166• “Tag Devices as Local,” on page 167• “Monitor SSD Devices,” on page 168• “Identify SSD Devices,” on page 168• “Identifying a Virtual SSD Device,” on page 168• “Best Practices for SSD Devices,” on page 169• “Swapping to Host Cache,” on page 169• “Preventing SSD Formatting During Auto-Partitioning,” on page 170• “Local SSDs Are Undetectable,” on page 171Benefits of SSD EnablementSSDs are very resilient and provide faster access to data.SSD enablement results in several benefits:• Use VMFS datastores that are created on SSD storage devices to allocate space for ESXi host cache.• Use local SSDs for such features as Flash Read Cache and Virtual SAN.• Use of SSDs increases virtual machine consolidation ratio as SSDs can provide very high I/Othroughput.• It supports identification of virtual SSD device by the guest operating system.VMware, Inc. 163