I picked up a Samsung PM983 from eBay for a price that was a little too good. What could go wrong? Turns out these things aren’t the easiest to get running with modern versions of ESXi and this likely influenced the price in my favour.

These SSDs have a variety of different firmwares, you cannot obtain new firmware from Samsung and as a result, you may have issues running the latest builds of ESXi 7.

How can I workaround this?

1. Consult the VMware HCL to figure out what version of ESXi your drive will work on
2. Grab the NVMe VIB from here for your supported version
3. Install the VIB over the top of the existing NVMe VIB
4. Reboot for the changes to take effect

But I’m booting from the NVMe drive!

It’s possible to make a custom ESXi installer with your own VIBs loaded or alternatively you could install onto a USB (unsupported in 8), load a working VIB then migrate your install to the NVMe device using dd.