HGST/Cisco SN200 SSDs & VMware

[muhfugen]

I bought 3 800GB HGST SN200 NVMe SSDs off eBay. One of them appears to be a retail drive, the other two appear to have been pulls from Cisco UCS systems as their model comes up in Windows as UCSC-NVMEHW-H800. Now the retail drive shows up in ESXi and can be used as a data store, strangely the Ciscos do not. In Storage Adapters the Cisco will show up as a vmhba with the name "Ultrastar SN200 Series NVMe SSD" however there are no Storage Devices associated with the adapter. The Cisco drives are however usable when configured to as a PCIe pass through to a Windows VM. Can anyone think of a reason why ESXi isnt wanting to work with these SSDs with Cisco firmware?

Also does anyone know where i can find firmware for these disks? Or how to download the retail firmware from one of them so I can upload it to another? HGST doesnt seem to have any option outside of opening support incidents.

 

[muhfugen]

So it turns out my problem was actually due to the Cisco disks being configured as 4k sector sizes instead of 512, even though ESXi 6.7 is supposed to support 4k native disks. After reformatting the device with the linux nvme-cli package (similar to the the process for SAS disks), the device became available to ESXi. If anyone knows where I can find retail firmware for this device, especially the versions on the vSAN HCL, I would appreciate it.