Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Full File Clone
The Full File Clone functionality allows ofl ine VMDKs to be cloned (cop-
ied) by the NAS device.
Lazy File Clone
This feature allows NAS devices to create native snapshots for the purpose
of space-conservative VMDKs for virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environments. It's
specii cally targeted at emulating the Linked Clone functionality vSphere offers on VMFS
datastores.
Extended Statistics
When you're leveraging the Lazy File Clone feature, this feature allows
more accurate space reporting.
In all cases, support for VAAI requires that the storage vendor's array be fully T10 compliant
(for block-level VAAI commands) or support VMware's i le-level NAS ofl oads via a vendor-
supplied plug-in. Check with your storage vendor to determine what i rmware revisions, soft-
ware levels, or other requirements are necessary to support VAAI/VAAIv2 with vSphere 5.5.
The vSphere Web Client reports VAAI support, so it's easy to determine if your array has
been recognized as VAAI capable by vSphere. Figure 6.23 shows a series of datastores; note the
status of the Hardware Acceleration column. You can see that some datastores clearly report
Supported in that column.
Figure 6.23
If all hardware
o oad features
are supported,
the Hardware
Acceleration sta-
tus is listed as
Supported.
vSphere determines the hardware acceleration status for VMFS datastores and NFS data-
stores differently. For VMFS datastores, if at least one of the various SCSI commands is unsup-
ported but others are supported, then the status will be listed as Unknown. If all the commands
are unsupported, it will list Not Supported; if all the commands are supported, it will list
Supported. You can gather a bit more detail about which commands are supported or not sup-
ported using the esxcli command-line utility from the vSphere Management Assistant. Run
this command:
esxcli -s vcenter-01 -h esxi-05.lab.local storage core device vaai status get
