If you a regular follower of my blog, you will probably notice I'm a bit of a storage geek. VAAI, FCoE, WWNs, WWPNs, VMFS, VASA and iSCSI are all music to my ears. So what's new to vSphere 5.0 storage technologies? A LOT. That team must have been working over time...
In case you were living under a rock today, or don't have lots of RSS subscriptions for virtualization blogs, you may not have heard that VMware announced their vSphere 5.0 product today. Although not shipping until late in Q3 of 2011, the cat is now out of the bag and...
In my previous blog I discussed how the VMware 4.1 VAAI 'write same' implementation in a 3PAR T400 showed a dramatic 20x increase in performance, creating an eager zeroed thick VMDK at 10GB/sec (yes, GigaBYTES a second). The other major SCSI primitive that VAAI 4.1 leverages is XCOPY (SCSI opcode 0x83). What this...
So in my previous blog entry I wrote about how I upgraded a 3PAR T400 to support the new VMware vSphere 4.1 VAAI extensions. I did some quick tests just to confirm the array was responding to the three new SCSI primitives, and all was a go. But to better...
For those of you using vSphere 4.1, one of the cool new features is VAAI support. What is VAAI? VAAI is a deep level of integration between select storage arrays and the ESX kernel. The three VAAI functions released in 4.1 are:•Atomic Test & Set (ATS), which is used during...