A quick note on VNX VAAI NFS plugin for vSphere 5.1

From an internal EMC vSpecialist thread (I’m trying to push people to ALWAYS post to the “Everything VMware at EMC” community or some other “google crawled place” (like a blog, including this one) – but there’s no escaping “quick and dirty” emails while we’re all running around.

This one is worth posting (thank you Craig Stewart – you rock!)

“Just wanted to give everyone an update on the responses I got from engineering / product management on the current state of the nation regarding the NFS VAAI Plug-in and ESXi 5.1.

• The current NFS VAAI plug-in release for vSphere 5.0 is compatible and is supported with vSphere 5.1 as VMware do not require any recertification between minor releases.
• The current NFS VAAI plug-in cannot be rolled out with VMware Update Manager to ESXi 5.1 hosts,  this has to be done as a manual installation using the ESXCLI.
• The current NFS VAAI plug-in release for vSphere 5.0 is not currently compatible with the INYO OE release,  this is currently undergoing recertification with VMware and is due for completion in a couple of weeks (Being worked on by ELab and USD under AR 506771)
• The next release of the NFS VAAI pug-in that supports INYO (VNX OE 32 is the official name) will also be tagged for deployment with VMware Update Manager for ESXi 5.1 hosts.

My customer that was looking to deploy this as part of their POC managed to deploy it manually with ESXi 5.1 and INYO and reported seeing significant performance improvement when provisioning linked clone VDI workloads on NFS.  Fine for a POC but will be advising that they wait for a certified version that works with INYO before using in production.”

Using the NFS plugin?   Dig it?   Feedback (hit us with the good/bad/ugly – this is how we continuously improve!!!)

Comments

[Justin Valdez]

So if we have the plugin installed, and are running the INYO code are we hurting ourselves?

[Craig Stewart]

Something worth pointing out for people reading this. The NFS VAAI Offload being used by the customer in question was something leveraged by View 5.1. From a VMware perspective this is an experimental feature and should not be leveraged in production, VMware do not offer support for this feature in View 5.1.

http://pubs.vmware.com/view-51/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.vmware.view.administration.doc%2FGUID-61ABF143-EE88-4688-AD84-056EBD0B918B.html

[Bill Oyler]

Chad, where can we download the new 5.1 and INYO SR1 certified NFS VAAI plug-in? The most current version on Powerlink/EMC Support is the v1.0 version of the plug-in.

[Chad Sakac]

@Bill - I've gotten some mixed reports recently of some people running into issues with the plugin. Can you stay on me, will get you an update.

[Cody]

Chad, I wanted to resurrect this post to find out if you ever received an update on the OE32 certified version of the NAS plugin. Thanks.