vsphere-esxi-vcenter-server-55-storage-guide

Storage Hardware Acceleration 24The hardware acceleration functionality enables the ESXi host to integrate with compliant storage arraysand offload specific virtual machine and storage management operations to storage hardware. With thestorage 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 NASdevices.For additional details, see the VMware knowledge base article at http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1021976.This chapter includes the following topics:• “Hardware Acceleration Benefits,” on page 235• “Hardware Acceleration Requirements,” on page 236• “Hardware Acceleration Support Status,” on page 236• “Hardware Acceleration for Block Storage Devices,” on page 236• “Hardware Acceleration on NAS Devices,” on page 241• “Hardware Acceleration Considerations,” on page 244Hardware Acceleration BenefitsWhen the hardware acceleration functionality is supported, the host can get hardware assistance andperform several tasks faster and more efficiently.The host can get assistance with the following activities:• Migrating virtual machines with Storage vMotion• Deploying virtual machines from templates• Cloning virtual machines or templates• VMFS clustered locking and metadata operations for virtual machine files• Writes to thin provisioned and thick virtual disks• Creating fault-tolerant virtual machines• Creating and cloning thick disks on NFS datastoresVMware, Inc. 235