Hi,
We have 30% of our production VMs with HotPlug disabled, the other 70% have HotPlug enabled. (https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1012225) The reason why HotPlug was disabled was because our DBAs could not make SQL backups to removable drives (at least that's what I was told and I know it's not a true statement) There is no confusion here about CPU/Memory HotAdd functionality. We have CPU/Memory disabled per VMWare best practices guide.
Our new requirement mandates that all data drives are encrypted with Bitlocker and with having HotPlug set to false presents a slight challenge. By default Windows sees all VM disks as removable which lets me auto unlock the data drives without encrypting the system drive. When HotAdd/HotPlug is disabled Windows sees VMWare disks are fixed, not removable drives and does not allow Bitlocker autounlock without encrypting the system drive and configuring autounlock. As a work around I can script a scheduled task to grab the unlock password from AD and unlock the drive, but this process introduces a few moving parts which I am trying to avoid.
So here are my questions:
1. Is there a performance loss/gain with devices.hotplug set to false?
2. Is anyone aware of and SQL limitations when VM disks are detected as removable ?
Thanks