Deploy ONTAP vSIM with vSCSI-Disks on ESXi

FelixTeupke — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 11:35:47 GMT

I've played around quite a bit with the vSIM in my lab environment (running in a vSphere cluster).
All my tests were quite short-lived and limited in scope, though, since I have only very limited storage available.
I read here that the simulators behind the Hands-On-Labs use vSCSI disks instead of emulated disks, and I tried getting that working with a new vSIM instance by adding a SCSI-controller and some 30GB-Disks.
I could not get those disks to show up though, no matter which type of SCSI-controller I selected within VMware.
@SeanHatfield is there anything I have to do within the vSIM so the disks are recognized?

Re: Deploy ONTAP vSIM with vSCSI-Disks on ESXi

SeanHatfield — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 15:55:02 GMT

There are several bootlegs you need to set or unset to switch it from vha disks to vscsi disks. I don't have a list handy, but if you review the bootargs on an LoD instance you'll see the differences. Also use the LSI-SAS type scsi controller. The PVSCSI controller isn't working.

topic Deploy ONTAP vSIM with vSCSI-Disks on ESXi in Simulator Discussions

Deploy ONTAP vSIM with vSCSI-Disks on ESXi

Re: Deploy ONTAP vSIM with vSCSI-Disks on ESXi