Change datastore's disk type that is not detected as an SSD disk

A few days ago, a co-worker asks me about "why my new SSD Drive has not been shown as an SSD drive type in ESXi configuration, Datastores information, whereas it's really an SSD datastore?" I told her it's not a big problem and the subject is about one of VMware Pluggable Storage Architecture (PSA): VMware SATPs (Storage Array Type Plugins) that are provided by ESXi for every type of array, especially storage vendors listed on VMware HCL. Also, you can see the list of SATP Plugins by running this command: esxcli storage nmp satp list :

As VMware said: "SATP beside PSP (Path Selection Plugin) are parts of NMP (Native Multipathing Plugin) together are responsible for array-specific operations. You can see the list of SATP Plugins by running this command: esxcli storage nmp psp list :

The only vendor that offers a special PSP is Dell for EqualLogic iSCSI array series. (and also EMC PowerPath as an additional plugin) VMware mentioned: "The NMP associates a set of physical paths with a specific storage device/LUN and assigned a default PSP for each logical device based on the SATP associated with the physical paths for that device." So she understood SATP has been associated with the storage device physical paths and PSP has been considered for handling and determining which physical path for I/O requests issued to a storage device.

Then I helped her to fix this problem. After establishing an SSH session to the host, we did below procedure step by step:

1. esxcli storage nmp device list

and then find your storage device and it's related SATP type and then copy it's naa.xxx identifier to use for the next rule adding step:

2.esxcli storage nmp satp rule add -s SATP_TYPE -d naa.xxx -o enabled_ssd

Next step needs to run for reclaiming:
3. esxcli storage core claiming reclaim -d naa.xxx

And now if you want to check your added rule:
4. esxcli storage nmp satp rule list
 

Note: You can't see changes on your datastore, and needs to reboot the host and check it again.