Problem with VAAI on vSphere 5

[opportunity]

We are in the process of deploying vSphere 5 with a new EMC VMAX array and are having what appears to be inconsistencies with VAAI operations.   We have verified and applied patches to Vmware and firmware updates to the VMAX.  We have a 72 GB VM that we are testing with.  After the VM is created and in a shutdown state, when we migrate it from datastore to datastore we see a high amount of Host I/O (using esxtop).  If we start up the VM and storage migrate, the migration appears to use VAAI since we see a relatively low I/O within esxtop.  If we stop the VM, it migrates using what appears to be VAAI since we see relatively low I/O within esxtop.  Is anyone else seeing behavior like this?  Is there a place to look within the VMware infarstructure to see any log messages from VAAI.  Any insight would be appreciated

Thanks in advance

[rickardnobel]

You could make sure that all LUNs/datastores have VAAI enabled and that ESXi is aware of the VAAI primitives. See this how to check through esxcli from the command line.

There are also some new counters in esxtop 5 to verify if VAAI is being used in action. I could check what they are called if you want.

[opportunity]

Thanks for the response, I will check it out.

As far as the counters for esxtop, could you check and let me know what they are.

[rickardnobel]

opportunity wrote:

As far as the counters for esxtop, could you check and let me know what they are.

Here is how to use esxtop to track VAAI usage. Just for you.