The virtual storage controllers that are presented to a virtual machine can impact the performance of those VMs greatly. New to vSphere 6.5, we have the availability of NVMe virtual storage controllers. NVMe as a storage technology is a great leap forward for performance. With NVMe the storage has direct access to the PCIe bus. With the required virtual machine hardware version 13, you can utilize the new NVMe controller on your virtual machine.
NVMe virtual storage controller requirements
- Windows 7 and 2008 R2 (hot fix required: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2990941)
- Windows 8.1, 2012 R2, 10, 2016
- RHEL, CentOS, NeoKylin 6.5 and later
- Oracle Linux 6.5 and later
- Ubuntu 13.10 and later
- SLE 11 SP4 and later
- Solaris 11.3 and later
- FreeBSD 10.1 and later
- Mac OS X 10.10.3 and later
- Debian 8.0 and later
Change Paravirtual to NVMe virtual storage controller in vSphere 6.5
- Adding the new NVMe Controller
- Adding a new temporary hard drive attached to the NVMe controller
- Allowing the operating system to install the storage controller driver for the new NVMe virtual storage controller
- Powering down the VM
- Changing the boot drive controller to the new NVMe controller
- Then delete the temporary hard drive we added.