PowerEdge: NVMe LED Management on Dell Servers and VMware ESXi
Summary: This article contains a Dell VMware NVMe LED Management, Technical white paper about NVMe Hot-Plug on Dell PowerEdge servers running VMware vSphere or vSAN.
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Instructions
This document contains details about NVMe device LED management on Dell PowerEdge servers and VMware ESXi together. Dell and VMware worked together to introduce LED management for NVMe devices for Dell PowerEdge servers and 7.0.x. We support NVMe LED management from 7.0 Patch01
Below are some of the specific command lines that users can use to invoke LED operations on NVMe devices.
As a first step, you must identify the device name which is created for a given NVMe device. Below are the steps to identify the device name of a specific NVMe device.
:~] esxcli nvme device list
# Provides a list of adapter names created for all the initialized NVMe devices.
:~] esxcli nvme device get -A <vmhba name>
# Detail the device attributes, vmhba name can be fetched from the previous command.
:~] esxcfg-mpath -l
# This command provides all the possible paths for a given device. Using the vmhba adapter name retrieved from the first command, you may search through this command output and fetch the "Device:" name reported for the device.
With the above three commands, you have the device names of all the NVMe devices connected to the system.
Note: VMware provides a namespace '
esxcli nvme' which provides multiple subnamespaces to fetch different types of NVMe details.
The below set of commands provides various LED management options that are provided in 7.x.
1)
# This command returns the physical device location of the device.
As an example, below command shows that the physical device is located in Slot #23 in backplane Bay2.
Physical Location: PCIe SSD in Slot 23 Bay 2
2)
# This command turns on green LED on the front side of the NVMe device. You may see that the LED started blinking constantly. This functionality helps to locate a specific NVMe device when more than one NVMe devices are connected on a given server.
3)
# This command turns off LED on the NVMe device.
4)
# This command turns on amber LED on the NVMe device. This is an option provided to set a device to failed (if needed).
References
1)
esxcli storage core device physical get -d <Device Name>
# This command returns the physical device location of the device.
As an example, below command shows that the physical device is located in Slot #23 in backplane Bay2.
:~] esxcli storage core device physical get -d t10.NVMe____Dell_Express_Flash_NVMe_P4510_1TB_SFF___0001803D65E4D25C
Physical Location: PCIe SSD in Slot 23 Bay 2
2)
esxcli storage core device set -l locator -d <Device Name>
# This command turns on green LED on the front side of the NVMe device. You may see that the LED started blinking constantly. This functionality helps to locate a specific NVMe device when more than one NVMe devices are connected on a given server.
3)
esxcli storage core device set -l off -d <Device Name>
# This command turns off LED on the NVMe device.
4)
esxcli storage core device set -l error -d <Device Name>
# This command turns on amber LED on the NVMe device. This is an option provided to set a device to failed (if needed).
References
Affected Products
VMware ESXi 7.x, VMware ESXi 8.xArticle Properties
Article Number: 000125986
Article Type: How To
Last Modified: 19 Apr 2026
Version: 7
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