SSD Emulated Virtual Disks for Nested ESXi

I came across a gotcha scenario when trying to deploy vSAN in my home lab. When adding disks to the nested ESXi server all of the disks are detected as regular ol’ spindle disks regardless of the actual underlying storage. So I was in need of a method to emulate an SSD device. Truth be told there are actually many other reasons why you might want to emulate a SSD disk.

The solution is easy! It’s just one simple edit to the virtual machine’s configuration file (VMX). As long as you’re running virtual machine hardware version 8 or later you can configure a specific virtual disk to appear as an SSD.

scsiX:Y.virtualSSD = 1

X represents the controller ID and Y is the disk ID of the virtual disk.