White Papers

In a virtualized environment, storage operations traditionally have been expensive from a resource perspective. Functions such as cloning and snapshots can be performed more efficiently by the storage device than by the host. VMware vSphere® Storage APIs – Array Integration (VAAI), also referred to as hardware acceleration or hardware offload APIs, are a set of APIs to enable communication between VMware vSphere ESXi™ hosts and storage devices. The APIs define a set of “storage primitives” that enable the ESXi host to offload certain storage operations to the array, which reduces resource overhead on the ESXi hosts and can significantly improve performance for storage-intensive operations such as storage cloning, zeroing, and so on. The goal of VAAI is to help storage vendors provide hardware assistance to speed up VMware® I/O operations that are more efficiently accomplished in the storage hardware.

Without the use of VAAI, cloning or migration of virtual machines by the vSphere VMkernel Data Mover involves software data movement. The Data Mover issues I/O to read and write blocks to and from the source and destination datastores. With VAAI, the Data Mover can use the API primitives to offload operations to the array if possible. For example, if the desired operation were to copy a virtual machine disk (VMDK) file from one datastore to another inside the same array, the array would be directed to make the copy completely inside the array. Whenever a data movement operation is invoked and the corresponding hardware offload operation is enabled, the Data Mover will first attempt to use the hardware offload. If the hardware offload operation fails, the Data Mover reverts to the traditional software method of data movement. 

In nearly all cases, hardware data movement will perform significantly better than software data movement. It will consume fewer CPU cycles and less bandwidth on the storage fabric. Improvements in performance can be observed by timing operations that use the VAAI primitives and using esxtop to track values such as CMDS/s, READS/s, WRITES/s, MBREAD/s, and MBWRTN/s of storage adapters during the operation.In the initial VMware vSphere 4.1 implementation, three VAAI primitives were released. These primitives applied only to block (Fibre Channel, iSCSI, FCoE) storage. There were no VAAI primitives for NAS storage in this 

initial release.In vSphere 5.0, VAAI primitives for NAS storage and VMware vSphere Thin Provisioning were introduced. 

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/VMware-vSphere-Storage-API-Array-Integration.pdf

VMware vSphere VMFS is a high-performance cluster file system (CFS) that enables virtualization to scale beyond the boundaries of a single system. Designed, constructed and optimized for the virtual infrastructure, VMFS increases resource utilization by providing multiple virtual machines with shared access to a consolidated pool of clustered storage. And it offers the foundation for virtualization spanning multiple servers, enabling services such as virtual machine snapshots, VMware vSphere Thin Provisioning, VMware vSphere vMotion, VMware vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (vSphere DRS), VMware vSphere High Availability (vSphere HA), VMware vSphere Storage DRS and VMware vSphere Storage vMotion.

VMFS reduces management overhead by providing a highly effective virtualization management layer that is especially suitable for large-scale enterprise datacenters. Administrators employing VMFS find it easy and straightforward to use, and they benefit from the greater efficiency and increased storage utilization offered by the use of shared resources.

This paper provides a technical overview of VMFS, including a discussion of features and their benefits. It highlights how VMFS capabilities enable greater scalability and decreased management overhead and it offers best practices and architectural considerations for deployment of VMFS.

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vmfs-best-practices-wp.pdf