Video - Provisioning Virtual Desktops with VMware View 5.1 and VAAI

Cormac Hogan: Although this feature is a Technology Preview in View 5.1, it is another cool storage feature of the release. View desktops deployed on VMware's linked clone technology consumes CPU on the ESXi hosts, and network bandwidth when they are deployed on NFS datastores.

With this new  Native NFS Snapshot feature via VAAI (vSphere Storage APIs for Array Integration), customers can offload the cloning operation to the storage array, minimizing CPU usage and network bandwidth consumption. Once again this enhanced VAAI functionality was introduced in vSphere 5.0 specifically for VMware View.

This feature requires a VAAI NAS plugin from the storage array vendor. Once installed and configured, customers will be able to use a storage array vendor's own native snapshot feature for deploying View desktops. Selecting this new desktop deployment method can be done via standard work-flows in View Composer.

http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/05/new-storage-features-in-vmware-view-51.html

https://communities.netapp.com/community/netapp-blogs/virtualization/blog/2012/05/02/vmware-view-51-view-storage-accelerator