With today’s release of vSphere 4.1 I’m confident that some may want to see the vStorage APIs for array integration (VAAI) in action with NetApp arrays. If you count yourself in this group you can catch the NetApp demo of the APIs from VMworld 2009 (September, 2009).
If we had the APIs in Data ONTAP ready back in the fall of 2009, just imagine where we might be with the next release of VAAI APIs…
Vaughn
As a demo this is great but...when is support going to be available in Data ONTAP? Which version will be supported, purely 8.0 and if so is that Cluster-Mode and 7-Mode?
Posted by: Chris M Evans | July 13, 2010 at 12:25 PM
Vaughn, My questions are similar but different to Chris Evans' above. You showed a demo of iSCSI capability for Full Copy that was made last year. Is that something that you have now with FC or iSCSI?
(disclosure - I work for 3PAR)
Posted by: marc farley | July 13, 2010 at 11:37 PM
In the other VAAI post, at the bottom you can read : "VAAI is available with vSphere 4.1 Enterprise and Enterprise Plus editions, and supports VMFS datastores served by block-based storage protocols FC, iSCSI, FCoE on arrays running Data ONTAP 8.0.1 in 7-Mode. 8.0.1 is targeted for release in Q4 2010."
If the demo's where show in September 2009, why wait 1+ year before giving the customer the benefits of VAAI ?
Erik Bussink (IT senior consultant for an Integrator of NetApp, HDS & EMC storage solutions)
Posted by: Erik Bussink | July 14, 2010 at 04:04 AM
@Chris & @Marc - Thanks for requesting the clarification. NetApp will fully support VAAI with the release of Data ONTAP 8.0.1 in 7-Mode with VMFS datastores running on FC, FCoE, and iSCSI. This release is targeted for general availability in Q4 of 2010.
Posted by: Vaughn Stewart | July 14, 2010 at 04:05 AM
@Erik - I believe we had targeted 8.0.1 to release close to the time when vSphere 4.1 released and thus efforts (like development, QA, etc.) were scheduled for this release. I'll have to double check, but I believe this is the case.
I can confirm that the various VAAI enablements reside in many earlier versions of ONTAP but are disabled by default as these release weren't targeted for support.
Posted by: Vaughn Stewart | July 14, 2010 at 04:13 AM
So can we expect that in future Netapp's general recommendations for provisioning datastores will move away from NFS and more toward block storage in order to take advantage of VAAI and SIOC?
Posted by: Mark Lomas | July 14, 2010 at 09:08 AM
@Mark - We love every protocol and every integration with VMware. We sell what customers desire, and the large installations trend to NFS for it's elegance in managing massive volumes of VMs with exceptional simplicity.
As for the first release of VAAI... You have it backwards. These features ALREADY EXIST in NFS. SAN is attempting to be more NAS-like. The VAAI roadmap is long, and it's chocked full of NFS goodness. Be patient.
As for SIOC... it's all on the roadmap...
Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
Posted by: Vaughn Stewart | July 15, 2010 at 06:10 PM