Chapter 16. VAAI

As vSphere 5 environments get larger and larger, the amount of data it handles gets even larger. This can have a negative effect on input/output (I/O) throughput and bandwidth as several operations done frequently by ESXi servers demand processing cycles and erode into valuable bandwidth. VMware designed a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) to offload most of the storage processing and bandwidth to the storage arrays, which frees up precious central processing unit (CPU) cycles and storage area network (SAN) /data local area network (LAN) bandwidth and allocates it to where it is needed.

This set of APIs is referred to VMware vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI). They utilize the T10 standard set of commands ...

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