VAAI Posturing

With yet another HDS/VAAI post coming out from Scott Lowe (here), the irrelevant debate continues as to who is in and who is out of VMware’s inner circle of trusted storage vendors.  Previously my friend Stephen Foskett discussed HDS’s position regarding VMware integration in this post, which followed on from an original post by Chris Mellor (who I hope would be happy to be called a friend of mine ).

So this is all great and understanding where vendors are heading in the future is nice to know, but perhaps we should take it back to today and the real world of using the current VAAI features.  We’ve seen lots of posturing about who was first to support when VAAI first came out, but at the end of the day, what’s relevant is how this feature support works in practice.  I’ve seen some good demonstrations of the technology, but as yet, there’s no meaningful measurement of who’s implementation of VAAI is best.  Clearly it will depend on the underlying hardware and the way the engineers have chosen to prioritise VAAI workloads.  I’ve not seen any answers to questions covering VAAI performance, if and how it could bring an array to its knees with overuse or how it can be controlled or prioritised.  Oh and don’t get me started with the security implications.  So for all of you out there involved in the discussion and promoting your VAAI support (that’s Scott, Heff and others), can you:

1. Provide real-world performance figures that show VAAI acceleration
2. Indicate how VAAI is prioritised/throttled from flooding a storage array
3. Explain how block copy functions are secure.

This degree of detail is much more interesting than discussing who’s in and out of the vStorage API Club.

As for the 3 points above, I’ll take the last one.  I promised to follow up on it so expect a blog post soon.  In the meantime, don’t question whether vendors have VAAI support – ask them how well that VAAI implementation works for you.

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