Add a Persistent Memory Disk in the Host Client

You can add a virtual hard disk to an existing virtual machine, or you can add a hard disk when you customize the virtual machine hardware during the virtual machine creation process. For example, you might need to provide additional disk space for an existing virtual machine with a heavy work load. During virtual machine creation, you might want to add a hard disk that is preconfigured as a boot disk.

During virtual machine creation, a hard disk and a SCSI or SATA controller are added to the virtual machine by default, based on the guest operating system that you select. If this disk does not meet your needs, you can remove it and add an existing hard disk at the end of the creation process.

Prerequisites

• Verify that you are familiar with configuration options and caveats for adding virtual hard disks. See Virtual Disk Configuration.
• Before you add disks larger than 2TB in size to a virtual machine, see vSphere Virtual Machine Administration.
• Verify that you have the Virtual machine.Configuration.Add new disk privilege on the destination folder or datastore.

Power off the virtual machine.

Procedure

1. Click Virtual Machines in the VMware Host Client inventory.
2. Right-click a virtual machine in the list and select Edit settings from the pop-up menu.
3. On the Virtual Hardware tab, select Add hard disk and select New persistent memory disk from the drop-down menu.
   The hard disk appears in the Virtual Hardware devices list. By default, the disk is stored on the host-local PMem datastore and you cannot change the datastore.
4. (Optional) Configure the settings for the new hard disk and click Save to close the wizard.
   1. Expand New Hard disk.
   2. Enter a value for the hard disk size and select the units from the drop-down menu.
      Note: All persistent memory hard disks and NVDIMM modules that you add to the virtual machine share the same PMem resources. So, you must adjust the size of the newly added persistent memory devices in accordance with the amount of the PMem available to the host. If any part of the configuration requires attention, the wizard alerts you.
   3. From the Shares drop-down menu, select a value for the shares to allocate to the virtual disk.
      Shares is a value that represents the relative metric for controlling disk bandwidth. The values Low, Normal, High, and Custom are compared to the sum of all shares of all virtual machines on the host.
   4. From the Controller location drop-down menu, select the location of the controller that the new hard disk uses.
   5. Select a disk mode.

      Option	Description
      Dependent	Dependent disks are included in snapshots.
      Independent-Persistent	Disks in persistent mode behave like conventional physical computer disks. All data written to a disk in persistent mode are written permanently to the disk.
      Independent-Nonpersistent	Changes to disks in nonpersistent mode are discarded when you power off or reset the virtual machine. The virtual disk returns to the same state every time you restart the virtual machine. Changes to the disk are written to and read from a redo log file that is deleted when you power off or reset.