vSphere Hotplug Support

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

This article outlines the current state of vSphere ESXi hot-add and hot-remove support of various virtual machine components. Hotplug operations have to be supported by the guest OS, otherwise added devices might not be detected or their removal might fail or cause failures.

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 7.0.0

Resolution

Device	Hot‑Add	Hot‑Remove
SCSI & AHCI disks / CDROMs	yes 1	yes 1
NVMe disks	yes 1 2	yes 1 2
PCI passthrough devices 3	no	no
PCI / PCIe devices (non-passthrough)	yes	yes
Memory	yes	no 4
CPU	yes 5	no 6
Other (non-PCI) devices: serial, parallel, floppy, IDE disks / CDROMs, TPM, watchdog	no	no

Note:

1. with the controller already present
2. extra steps might be required within the guest OS
3. the presence of a PCI Passthrough device will prevent hotplug operation of CPU, memory and PCI(e) devices (SCSI disk and CDROM hotplug will continue working as long as the controller itself doesn't need to be hotplugged)
4. if VMware Tools / the balloon driver is installed, set a memory limit if live reclamation is strictly necessary
5. disables vNUMA
6. offline CPU from within the guest instead