I’m having a bit of a “geek out” this weekend. But before I test my speedy new SSDs attached to VMs hosted within my ESX hosts, I thought I’d share just how easy it is to install and configure Samsung 840 Pro SSD Flash disks. My servers are HP ML110s and I’m using VMware vSphere 5.1.

1. Install the SSD within the caddy. Then install within the server disk drive bay.

2. Connect the SSD to the 6Gb/s SATA bus, and connect power cables.

Note: Samsung 840 Pro is also compatible with 3Gb/s.

3. Start up your ESX server, then connect and login using vClient.

4. Using vClient, click the ESX Configure tab and then select Storage Adapters. Click Rescan All.

5. Click OK to scan all attached devices.

6. Select Storage, then click Add Storage.

7. Select Disk/LUN storage type and then click Next.

8. You should now see the SSD disk is added. Select you SSD, then click Next.

9. Select VMFS-5 file system. Click Next.

10. Give the Datastore to be created a name, e.g. 01flashSSD01.

11. Click Next to create the Datastore using all available disk space.

12. Review your configuration. Click Finish.

And that’s it. I did say easy. You now have high-speed SSD disk installed, configured and presented as a VMFS-5 Datastore. In my next blog I’ll run a 64-bit Windows 2008 server on SSD and I’ll use IOMETER to compare IOPs achieved with traditional spinning disk.