VAAI : Cloning does not get offloaded to storage array.

[memaad]

Hello Team,

Need your help on this issue.

Issue Description : When we initiate cloning of any VM on datastore which support VAAI ( hardware acceleraion ), we see,  it is slow.

Findings :

VAAI ( XCOPY ) does not get initiated, I checked  from esxtop  , Parameter like  CLONE_RD CLONE_WR , does not show any activity.

VAAI is enabled on ESXi host.

No command failure messages in  vmkernel or vmkwarning logs.

ESXi 5.5 U2 version.

In another similar setup, but with version esxi 5.1 , it work fine.

Do we need to VAAI filter attached to device ?

Any thoughts on this ?

Regards

Mohammed Emaad

[Geogee]

Do you have any news or info on this issue? I am finding the same, Even when I have vSphere 6.0 U2 and Storage is iSCSI attached QUADstore appliance with showing VAAI supported, but cannot see any activity of XCOPY in ESXTOP.

[kastlr]

Hi,

to perform VAAI operations some prereqs must be fulfilled.

VAAI hardware offload cannot be used when:

• The source and destination VMFS volumes have different block sizes
• The source file type is RDM and the destination file type is non-RDM (regular file)
• The source VMDK type is eagerzeroedthick and the destination VMDK type is thin
• The source or destination VMDK is any kind of sparse or hosted format
• Cloning a virtual machine that has snapshots because this process involves consolidating the snapshots into the virtual disks of the target virtual machine.
• The logical address and/or transfer length in the requested operation is not aligned to the minimum alignment required by the storage device (all datastores created with the vSphere Client are aligned automatically)
• The VMFS datastore has multiple LUNs/extents spread across different arrays

Regards,

Ralf