Hello. I've been following the progress of VAAI support being added to the 'target-core' framework in the Linux kernel. Support for all 4 features did not make it into the recent 3.11 kernel release but is planned for 3.12.
There is some detail on VAAI (Vsphere APIs for Array Integration) here. VAAI is obviously a VMware term, but the SCSI primitives it refers to are open. From the above linked page: "VAAI significantly enhances the integration of storage and servers by enabling seamless offload of locking and block operations onto the storage array." It seems reasonable to assume that Fedora 20 (and probably Fedora 19 with a kernel update at some stage) will be using the 3.12 kernel and could be used to export iSCSI/FC targets to Ovirt. VMware also provides VAAI integration for NAS datastores (via the installation of a vendor specific plugin into Vmware Vcenter) that also significantly improves performance for some operations. From what I can make out from the VMware documentation the ability to use the VAAI offloads only applies to the upper tier licensed version of vcenter. I think there is an opportunity for Ovirt to add support for this feature and make it stand out even against the freely licensed ESXi (which will be missing this feature). With more people looking to Ovirt rather than getting started and potentially staying with VMware this is a good opportunity to gather market share. What is the current status of support for these VAAI scsi primitives in Ovirt? Is there anything planned at the moment? Regarding the VAAI NAS plugin feature that VMware now has - are there plans to help offload certain operations happening on NFS datastores? For instance some sort of agent that can be installed on a Linux NFS server could allow oVirt to instruct the NFS server machine to perform an offloaded copy/clone operation rather than that process needing to be done over the wire. Thanks, Paul
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