How to enable VAAI on ESX for XIV storage

Many administrators don’t know how powerful VAAI (storage hardware acceleration)  is, some of them ignores but if your storage supports VAAI I strongly recommend to enable it in your environment, you will see how beneficial it is and you will love it, I guarantee 🙂 . You can see benefits on one of my latest posts:

[box type=”info”] http://www.vmwaremine.com/2012/03/14/vaai-what-is-that/[/box]

How to enable VAAI on your ESX(i) ? Is enabled by default on ESX(i) hosts but to have it supported you must enable it on storage . Below example shows how to enable VAAI support on IBM XIV storage.

Requirements:

• vSphere 4 as a hypervisor
• XIV microcode 10.2.4a

VAAI not supported

What to do ?

1. Make sure that you have the latest microcode on IBM XIV installed – if not update it
2. Download IBM XIV driver for ESX(i) hypervisor
   [box type=”download”] Download XIV driver for vSphere[/box]
3. Install driver:
   • on ESX
     [sourcecode language=”bash”]
     esxupdate –bundle=vmware-esx-ibm_vaaip_module-offline-bundle.zip –nodeps –maintenancemode update
     [/sourcecode]
   • on ESXi

     vihostupdate --server IP address --username username --password password --install -bundle c:\vmware-esx-ibm_vaaip_module-offline-bundle.zip

4. Reboot server
5. If you have ESX installed you have to claim XIV LUNs manually ( ESXi can claim LUNs automatically and manual intervention is not needed).

   /usr/sbin/claim_ibm.sh

6. Verify whether LUNs were claimed by driver or not, execute below command from ESX console and check name for VAAI Plugin name; should be IBM_VAAIP_MODULE

   esxcli vaai device list

7. Increase data transfer chunk size from default 4096kB to 16384kB
   [sourcecode language=”bash”]esxcfg-advcfg /DataMover/MaxHWTransferSize -s 16384 [/sourcecode]
8. Done, now in column Hardware acceleration, status is supported

VAAI support enabled

[box type=”info”] IBM guide for VAAI configuration on ESX and XIV[/box]