Sometimes you’d need to test/simulate some features in your lab, but you can’t because a real SSD drive must be installed in your system, like testing VSAN or Flash cache, this quick guide will teach you how to simulate SSD drives:
(this guide is applicable to VMware workstation and ESXi as well, hardware ver.8 and above is required.
in the following scenario I suppose that you are simulating vSphere environment in your lab, the following steps are executed on ESXi 6.0 VM hosted on VMware Workstation 12 Pro
- power off the ESXi VM.
- edit the VM settings.
- add a new hard disk.
- after adding it, click on it from the left pane, then click on “Advanced” button on the right-hand side panel.
- learn about the controller the new drive is attached to, like “SCSI0:1”
- navigate to the folder of the ESXi VM on your computer.
- make a backup copy from the .vmx configuration file.
- edit the original .vmx file using a word processing app, like wordpad.
- paste the following line at the very end of the vmx file, but replace the X and Y by the values you’ve got in step 5.
scsiX:Y.virtualSSD = “1”
10. save the vmx file and power on the VM.
11. after the ESXi finishes startup loading, login to it by either web client or vSphere client (depending on your scenarion).
12. navigate to the storage settings, you should see the new added drive and the type is “FLASH”
13. now you are done.
Also watch the video below for better understanding, the language of the video is Arabic.
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