Following up on this work (not mine) to enable NVME tiering using a shared device, I wanted to use a single device for booting ESXi, tiering device, small datastore, maybe OSDATA. VMWare prevents this from working OOTB with a test that will only activate NVME tiering if both the GUID is correct "B3676DDDA38A4CD6B970718D7F873811" AND the partition number is 1.
For one of my homelab machines I wanted to play around with this, but this seemingly arbitrary restriction was preventing me, so I patched it
figured I would document it here in case somebody else was trying to get this working also. I used a similar method to the esxi-unlocker to create an extra vmtar file with the patched libtierdevice-nvme.so at boot.
For one of my homelab machines I wanted to play around with this, but this seemingly arbitrary restriction was preventing me, so I patched it
figured I would document it here in case somebody else was trying to get this working also. I used a similar method to the esxi-unlocker to create an extra vmtar file with the patched libtierdevice-nvme.so at boot.# patch /usr/libexec/jumpstart/plugins/libtierdevice-nvme.so
# replace the JNZ @ 0x4EE9 with NOP NOP
# 75 08 85 C0 0F 84 FD 00 00 00 48 8B 85 70 FD FF
# 90 90 85 C0 0F 84 FD 00 00 00 48 8B 85 70 FD FF
perl -pi -e 's/\x75\x08\x85\xC0\x0F\x84\xFD\x00\x00\x00\x48\x8B\x85\x70\xFD\xFF/\x90\x90\x85\xC0\x0F\x84\xFD\x00\x00\x00\x48\x8B\x85\x70\xFD\xFF/' "$1"