Virtual Machine creation or clone operations taking longer in vSphere 7.x and later

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi 7.0
• VMware vSphere ESXi 8.0

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:
The operation such as VM creation or VM clone on a local SSD device using VMFS may take longer in vSphere 7.x and later as compared to earlier vSphere releases such as 6.x
This behavior applies to local SSD devices using VMFS only.

Cause

To prevent a possible data integrity issue on local SSD devices using VMFS we have turned off using hardware acceleration feature of local SSD devices and this may result in operations such as VM creation or VM clone on a local SSD device using VMFS taking longer compared to earlier 6.x release.

Resolution

This is a limitation in design/feature as SCSI Command support/handling can vary across SSDs from different vendors. It is difficult to find such data inconsistency issues for all SSDs especially if this is not a consistent error signature and needs to be handled case-by-case.
Therefore, the user can decide to enable hardware accelerated zeroing after ensuring that SSD might not have the issue described above.

Workaround:
To workaround this issue, enable hardware accelerated zeroing by following the steps below.

Important:

Before following this workaround ensure that the SSD device being used will perform hardware acceleration correctly and will not cause any data integrity issues.

1. Log into the ESXi host through SSH as root
2. Run the following command from the command line.

   esxcli storage core device vaai status set -Z 1 -d <NAA ID>

Note: “NAA ID” stands for device ID.

The above command will turn on hardware zeroing for the device and will use write-same to achieve zeroing.