vSphere 4.1 and EMC - VAAI - Hardware Accelerated Full Copy

This is a demonstration of the effect of the new vStorage API for Array Integration (VAAI) in vSphere 4.1 in combination with EMC Unified Storage platform support for these hardware offloads.

Specifically, it shows the "before" and "after" of enabling hardware acceleration of Storage VMotion via the Fast Copy API. This new feature - requiring vSphere 4.1 and platform support like that in the EMC Unified (July) and VMAX platforms (Q4) issues a single command (SCSI Extended Copy) instead of the old way (many, MANY repeated SCSI read/write commands) - accomplishing cloning, deploy from template and storage vmotion tasks much faster, using fewer array and ESX resources, enabling higher degrees of efficiency and consolidation.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• vStorage
• API
• for
• Array
• Integration
• vSphere
• 4.1
• EMC
• Unified
• Celerra
• CLARiiON
• Fast
• Copy
• Hardware
• Acceleration
• Storage
• VMotion

[DaRealHess]

@pdisme you can use esxtop from the VIMA, a virtual Management Appliance you run as VM on the ESXi host.

[steveheg1]

the tool being used to monitor/display the commands/sec and MB/sec is VMware's esxtop. Just run it from the ESX console.

No counters were removed from the display. All are at default.

[pdisme]

What is that tool being used to see the commands/sec and MB/sec? Is it available in ESXi remote CLI?

[jagapriest]

Good job on removing the latency counters

[DaRealHess]

I like the way the new vSphere Storage API is being utilized now by the different Storage vendors to come up with some really exciting stuff to improve functionality like in this case with Storage VMotion. Good stuff from EMC.