VAAI is a set of features introduced in vSphere 4.1 that provide hardware acceleration and offload functionality for some types of operations. Initially, designed only for block-based storage, with vSphere 5.0 this has also been extended to NFS datastores.
In vSphere 6.x VAAI isn't changed, but now it's available for the Standard edition. VAAI is enabled by default and you can control it with the following ESXi advanced settings:
|
Advanced parameter |
Description |
|
HardwareAcceleratedLocking |
ATS that is used during creation of files on the VMFS volume |
|
HardwareAcceleratedMove |
Clone Blocks/Full Copy/XCOPY, that is used to copy data |
|
HardwareAcceleratedInit |
Zero blocks/Write Same, that is used to zero-out disk regions |
For more information, see KB 1021976—Frequently Asked Questions for vStorage APIs for Array Integration (https://kb.vmware.com/kb/1021976).