

UPDATE (05/23/19)- After speaking with a few folks who took a closer look, the issue is due to the fact that we added support for NVMe 1.3 spec in latest ESXi 6.7 Update 2 release, but because these are "consumer" devices, they did not conform to the latest specification and hence the driver is unable to claim the device. Simply copy nvme.v00 VIB from the ESXi 6.5 Update 2 and replace it on ESXi 7.0 system (either live under /bootbank or part of the installer) but rename the file to nvme_pci.v00 which is the new filename for NVMe driver. UPDATE (06/13/20) - Thanks to reader Dave, it looks like this trick also works with ESXi 7.0 but the filename has changed. I will keep this list updated, so feel free to leave a comment below. I wanted to share some of the model and/or vendors that folks have reported success with. UPDATE (07/29/20) - Over the past few months, I have had a number of folks share feedback that using the trick mentioned below for ESXi 7.0, they have had success of ESXi detecting their NVMe SSD. It is unclear whether support for these SSDs were removed intentionally or unintentionally, but in either case, these devices are not officially on VMware's Hardware Compatibility List (HCL). It turns out these Crucial devices were working fine while running on ESXi 6.5 Update 2 but was no longer recognized in latest release of ESXi 6.7 Update 2. This was also quite timely as I recently purchased a Crucial M.2 NVMe SSD and would have also ran into this problem. Thanks to Pete Lindley, (OCTO for End-User Computing), who reached out last week regarding the observation as well as a workaround for the problem.


If you own or have recently purchased Crucial NVMe SSD such as CT1000P1SSD8 (1TB M.2 NVMe SSD) or CT500P1SSD8 (500GB M.2 NVMe SSD), please be aware that these devices may no be recognized by ESXi after upgrading to the latest release.
