With the release of VMware vSphere 4.1, VMware made available the vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI). The VAAI can offload specific storage operations to compliant storage hardware, which results in less CPU, memory and storage fabric bandwidth consumption, for which the technical details ware covered by virtualization.info before.
NetApp has released a paper titled: Understanding and Using vStorage APIs for Array Integration and NetApp Storage. The paper which contains 22 pages covers the following topics:
- Introduction
- About VAAI
- Covering Full Copy, Block Zeroing, Hardware-assisted locking, relationship of use case, primitive, and SCSI command and VAAI and NFS.
- Using and Managing VAAI
- Covering VAAI requirements, enabling and disabling VAAI, Running VAAI operations, Viewing VAAI statistics in esxtop and observing vStorage on net App storage systems.
- Performance
- Performance of cloning, migrating and zeroing VMs and VMFS datastore scalability.
"…The results of these tests demonstrated that performance impact measured before or without VAAI was either eliminated or substantially reduced when using VAAI, to the point that datastores could reliably be scaled to 128 VMs in a single LUN…"
Thanks to Eric Sloof for providing the news…