ESXI 8 - not seeing15.36TB (PM1733 and Kioxia cm6)

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zer0gravity

Active Member
Feb 15, 2013
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I've tired both a Dell T7920 Rack and Dell T7920 tower and trying to get ESXI 8 to see a Samsung PM1733 15.36TB drive and Kioxia CM6 (I have 8x in total) as a device, to build a datastore. The BIOS CAN SEE the NVME drives (I've attached it via cheap amazon NVME/PCIE adapter, HBA card, and even a PCIE to M.2 to PCIE /NVME cable that came with my Intel Optane P4800X.) I ruled out the adapters also by having ESXI 8 can see 4x Intel P4800X using the same adapters so I know they work.

PN: MZWLJ15THALA-00007 (6x)

PN: KCM6XRUL15T3 (2x)

I did a test install of ESXI 6.5 to try a lower NVME driver but also no luck.

Also, I've also run a Windows 11 install on the hardware (no ESXI) and windows see the PM1733/CM6 without any issues. The drives test fine only PCIE Gen 3 speeds but works great in Windows 11.

Ideas of maybe firmware? (I don't even know where to find the newest) as Samsung magician didn't have it. Suggestions?
 

CreoleLakerFan

Active Member
Oct 29, 2013
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Not a lot of Samsung NVME drives on VMware HCL. I haven't seen any flings for them either. I recently bought a couple of PM983a and ended up having to pass them through to a TrueNAS VM and then share them back to the ESXi host as NFS datastores... Kind of clunky but it works, and I was planning a nested TrueNAS VM anyway ...
 

mrpasc

Active Member
Jan 8, 2022
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Munich, Germany
Possible your PM1733 and CM6 are 4kn drives.
Although ESXi can use HDDs with 4kn sector size since 7.02 it can’t for NVME drives.
Reformat to 512 sector size and you can use them.
 

dj-shd

New Member
Apr 6, 2023
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it may be your firmware version on the PM1733. The VMware site shows that the firmware required for ESXI 8 on pm1733 is EPK98B5Q. Depending on when you got the drives, you are probably on EPK9AB5Q. I am currently struggling with looking for firmware myself so can't really help you there.
 

zer0gravity

Active Member
Feb 15, 2013
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it may be your firmware version on the PM1733. The VMware site shows that the firmware required for ESXI 8 on pm1733 is EPK98B5Q. Depending on when you got the drives, you are probably on EPK9AB5Q. I am currently struggling with looking for firmware myself so can't really help you there.

I'll boot up in win 11 and see if I can figure out what it shows.


Possible your PM1733 and CM6 are 4kn drives.
Although ESXi can use HDDs with 4kn sector size since 7.02 it can’t for NVME drives.
Reformat to 512 sector size and you can use them.
Not a bad idea. I can format these with minitool partition wizard in Win 11.
 

dj-shd

New Member
Apr 6, 2023
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I'll boot up in win 11 and see if I can figure out what it shows.




Not a bad idea. I can format these with minitool partition wizard in Win 11.
I got the update if you want to try to see if it fixes your issue, from what I could find, that's the most recent update for the pm1733
 

mattventura

Active Member
Nov 9, 2022
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Not a bad idea. I can format these with minitool partition wizard in Win 11.
I don't know if that tool can do the type of formatting needed here. It's a lower-level NVMe-specific thing. I can't find a Windows-specific tool unfortunately, you might need to boot a linux live disk.
 

zer0gravity

Active Member
Feb 15, 2013
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can you see the drivesi in bios?
Yes.

Update - might be switching to Promox. I have zero issues so far with passing the PCIE devices through to my VMs and getting full speeds (Gen 3)


Anyone know to check what sector size the drives are using?