Does your Synology NFS datastore look like this? Is Hardware Acceleration “not supported”?
Well, you’re lucky because this is a quick and vendor-supported fix.
By enabling the VAAI plugin, you will see much better performance and also gain access to the full set of VMWare features:
Synology supports VAAI primitives including Hardware Assisted Locking (ATS), Block Zero, Full Copy, and Thin Provisioning. The complete VAAI support offloads tasks from ESXi to the storage array, realizing significant gains in performance and efficiency in storage utilization. By incorporating Synology storage solutions for virtualization, users can expand their capacity with minimal cost and complexity.
How do I install Synology NFS VAAI Plug-in on an ESXi host?
To install via the command line:
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- Download the Synology NFS Plug-in online bundle and upload this .vib file to a datastore on your ESXi host. Alternatively, you can directly run wget on your ESXi host to download the .vib file (online bundle).
- Connect to your ESXi host via SSH, and execute the following command. Please make sure to replace the datastore name in the command with the name of your own.
esxcli software vib install –v /vmfs/volumes/Datastore/esx-nfsplugin.vib
Reboot the ESXi host.
The enhanced features with hardware acceleration will take effect when it boots back up.
2 Comments
brimur · March 9, 2018 at 10:19 am
Shame it only works for NFS3 datastores and not NFS41 datastores
Tyler Woods · March 9, 2018 at 10:22 am
Correct, NFS 4.1 doesn’t support any sort of hardware acceleration. https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/6.0/com.vmware.vsphere.storage.doc/GUID-8A929FE4-1207-4CC5-A086-7016D73C328F.html
If you need multipath I/O I would use iSCSI.
Thanks for the comment!