What VAAI offloaded operations are supported by Data ONTAP?
Applies to
- Data ONTAP 7-Mode
- Clustered Data ONTAP
- VMware vSphere Storage APIs - Array Integration (VAAI)
- NetApp NFS Plug-in for VMware VAAI
Answer
- Data ONTAP provides native support for the following VAAI operations on SAN storage:
- Copy offload
- Atomic Test & Set (ATS) locking
- Write Same
- Out-of-space condition handling
- Space reclamation
- Data ONTAP does not provide native support for VAAI operations on NFS storage.
- To add support for some VAAI operations, install the Netapp NFS Plug-in for VMware VAAI on the ESXi host(s).
- Once the plugin is installed, Data ONTAP can be configured to support the following VAAI operations on NFS storage:
- Creation of thick VMDKs
- Copy offload
- For more detailed information on which primitives are supported per protocol and Data ONTAP type, refer to the chart below.
| VAAI Category | VAAI Primitive – Description | Data ONTAP 7-Mode (8.2 and later) | Clustered Data ONTAP (8.2 and later) |
|---|---|---|---|
|
NAS (Requires NetApp NFS Plugin for VAAI to be installed on ESXi) |
|||
| Thin provisioning | Extended Statistics – approximate space usage | No | Yes (Unique Block Reporting support is limited) |
| Reserve Space – create thick VMDK (lazy or eager zero) | Yes | Yes | |
| Copy offload (VM clone) | Copy within the same volume | Yes | Yes |
| Copy between volumes in same vFiler/SVM (same node) | Yes | Yes | |
| Copy between volumes in same SVM (different node) | N/A | Yes | |
| Copy between volumes in different SVM, same cluster | N/A | Yes | |
|
SAN |
|||
| Thin Provisioning | Write Same – zero disk blocks when new/uninitialized or cloning eager zeroed thick | Yes | Yes |
| Out of Space conditions (VMs requesting additional space from thin provisioned datastores that are 100% used will be paused) | Yes | Yes | |
| Space Reclamation (UNMAP) – manually using esxcli storage vmfs unmap command, or automated in ESXi 6.5 | Yes | Yes | |
| Scale | Atomic Test & Set enhanced locking | Yes | Yes |
| Copy offload (VM clone or Storage vMotion) | Copy within same volume | Yes | Yes |
| Copy between volumes in same vFiler/SVM | Yes | Yes | |
| Copy between volumes in different 7-Mode controllers | No | N/A | |
| Copy between volumes in different SVM, same cluster | N/A | Yes | |
- Note: Some primitives are only supported in certain circumstances. Refer to the list of caveats below.
- When performing a Storage vMotion on NFS datastores, only cold migration is supported for VAAI copy offload.
- Live Storage vMotion is not offloaded to storage.
- When performing a copy offload operation on NFS datastores backed by Data ONTAP 8.2.1 7-Mode, copy offload fails to clone files greater than 64GB within the same single-instance storage (SIS) enabled volume.
- This issue is fixed in 8.2.1P1. For more information, see BUG 807264.
- When using thin provisioning features on SAN datastores, the LUNs must have space allocation enabled.
- For more information on the space allocation setting, see What does the LUN option space_alloc do?.
- For more information on enabling space allocation on a LUN, refer to your ONTAP command manual.
- When using copy offload operations on an ESXi 5.0 host, the host may fail with a purple diagnostic screen.
- The issue has been corrected in ESXi 5.0U2 and later.
- If you are running one of the affected versions of ESXi and cannot upgrade, disable copy offload.
- For more information on disabling copy offload, see How to disable SAN VAAI Copy Offload on an ESX/ESXi host.
- When performing a Storage vMotion on NFS datastores, only cold migration is supported for VAAI copy offload.
Additional Information
For more information on the NetApp NFS Plug-in for VMware VAAI, refer to the Documentation Library.