VAAI coming to vSphere Standard
Some interesting news has come out of VMware recently: VAAI (vStorage API for Array Integration) which was recently limited to the Enterprise and Enterprise Plus editions of vSphere, is now available in vSphere Standard Edition. If you aren’t familiar with VAAI, in a nutshell it is an API that offloads a lot of IO heaving tasks to the storage device (assuming the device supports it). A good example would be cloning a VM. Without VAAI, vSphere would contact the ESXi server, examine the VM, read a few blocks from the storage device, then write a few blocks to the storage device, and repeat until done. This had a lot of overhead. ...