vSphere Storage - ESXi 5.1 - Documentation - VMware

Storage Hardware Acceleration 21
The hardware acceleration functionality enables the ESXi host to integrate with compliant storage arrays and
offload specific virtual machine and storage management operations to storage hardware. With the storage
hardware assistance, your host performs these operations faster and consumes less CPU, memory, and storage
fabric bandwidth.
The hardware acceleration is supported by block storage devices, Fibre Channel and iSCSI, and NAS devices.
For additional details, see the VMware knowledge base article at http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1021976.
This chapter includes the following topics:
n “Hardware Acceleration Benefits,” on page 215
n “Hardware Acceleration Requirements,” on page 216
n “Hardware Acceleration Support Status,” on page 216
n “Hardware Acceleration for Block Storage Devices,” on page 216
n “Hardware Acceleration on NAS Devices,” on page 221
n “Hardware Acceleration Considerations,” on page 224
Hardware Acceleration Benefits
When the hardware acceleration functionality is supported, the host can get hardware assistance and perform
several tasks faster and more efficiently.
The host can get assistance with the following activities:
n Migrating virtual machines with Storage vMotion
n Deploying virtual machines from templates
n Cloning virtual machines or templates
n VMFS clustered locking and metadata operations for virtual machine files
n Writes to thin provisioned and thick virtual disks
n Creating fault-tolerant virtual machines
n Creating and cloning thick disks on NFS datastores
VMware, Inc. 215