In my lab environment I was looking to tag a local hard drive as SSD in order to configure and manage vSphere Flash Read Cache, this activity actually ticks two boxes in the VCAP5-DCA blueprint as in order to achieve this I was required to use the Pluggable Storage Architecture (PSA) related commands from the esxcli storage namespace.
Firstly, as my ESXi host systems are nested I created a virtual machine hard disk to be used as a local SSD device and then I connected to the ESXi host system using an SSH client. By using the esxcli storage namespace I will list the devices available to determine the device name to which I require to create a rule to tag the local device as an SSD.
esxli storage nmp device list Device Display Name: Local VMware Disk (mpx.vmhba1:C0:T1:L0)
Now, we want to create and add a PSA rule to the device we have discovered and tag this as a SSD device. Once the rule has been created we will be required to restart the ESXi host system for the changes to apply to the local device.
esxcli storage nmp satp rule add –-satp=VMW_SATP_LOCAL –-device mpx.vmhba1:C0:T1:L0 --option "enable_local enable_ssd"
On restart, we can now confirm that the local device is now being discovered as an SSD drive type.
Deans Blog 