19 NetApp Storage Best Practices for VMware vSphere
DEDUPLICATION MANAGEMENT WITH VMWARE
Through the NetApp vCenter plug-ins, VMware administrators have the ability to enable, disable, and
update data deduplication on a datastore-by-datastore basis. The details on this capability are covered in
the vSphere Dynamic Storage Provisioning and Management section of this report.
2.12 VSTORAGE ARRAY INTEGRATION IN VMWARE VSPHERE 4.1
With the release of vSphere 4.1, VMware has delivered a set of storage constructs enhancing storage
array integration in vSphere. These enhancements consist of three main components:
vStorage APIs for array integration
Storage I/O control
Storage performance statistics
VSTORAGE APIS FOR ARRAY INTEGRATION
vStorage APIs for array integration (VAAI) provide a mechanism for the acceleration of certain functions
typically performed at the hypervisor by offloading these operations to the storage array. The goal of VAAI
is to enable greater scalability at the host layer by freeing hypervisor resources (CPU, memory, I/O, and
so on) during operations such as provisioning and cloning. This first release of VAAI provides support for
new features only in VMFS datastores. In the case of NFS datastores on NetApp storage, many
operations with respect to VM provisioning and cloning are already offloaded to the storage array with the
combined capabilities of the VSC and file-level FlexClone. The initial release of VAAI expands VMFS to
include similar capabilities. The current release of VAAI has three capabilities:
Full copy. When a data copy is initiated from the ESX/ESXi host, VAAI enables the storage array to
perform that copy within the array, without the host having to read and write the data. This reduces
the time and network load of cloning and migrating VMs with vMotion.
Block zeroing. When a new virtual disk is created, such as an eager-zeroed thick VMDK, the disk
must be formatted and written full of zeroes. VAAI allows the storage array to format zeroes into the
disks, removing this workload from the host.
Hardware-assisted locking. VMFS is a shared cluster file system. Therefore, it requires
management of metadata and locking to make sure that multiple hosts do not gain write access to the
same data simultaneously. VAAI provides an alternative method of locking to that of SCSI-2
reservations used in previous releases. This new method of locking is managed automatically by the
host and storage array and allows for greater scalability of VMFS datastores.
VAAI support requires that the storage array is running an operating system version that provides
support. To use VAAI, the NetApp array must be running NetApp Data ONTAP version 8.0.1. VAAI is
enabled by default in Data ONTAP and in ESX/ESXi. Version 2.0 of the VSC indicates whether or not a
storage array supports VAAI and if VAAI is enabled on that array.
STORAGE I/O CONTROL
The storage I/O control (SIOC) feature introduced in vSphere 4.1 enables quality of service control for
storage using the concepts of shares and limits in the same way CPU and memory resources have been
managed in the past. SIOC allows the administrator to make sure that certain VMs are given priority
access to storage compared to other VMs, based on the allocation of resource shares, maximum IOPS
limits, and whether or not the datastore has reached a specified congestion threshold. SIOC is currently
only supported on FC or iSCSI VMFS datastores.
To use SIOC, it must first be enabled on the datastore, and then resource shares and limits must be
applied to the VMs in that datastore. The VM limits are applied on the Resources tab in the VM Edit
Settings dialog window. By default, all VMs in the datastore are given equal resource shares and
unlimited IOPS.