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VAAI Support and Limitations for NFS FlexGroup Volumes in ONTAP

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Applies to

  • NetApp FlexGroup Volumes
  • VMware vSphere with NetApp NFS Plug-in for VAAI

Answer

Currently only the Copy‑Offload primitive is supported with FlexGroup volumes.

Please note the following VAAI limitations when using FlexGroup/FlexVol:

 VAAI Limitations with FlexGroup/FlexVol

  • VAAI offload is supported only for powered‑off virtual machines and templates
  • VAAI offload will not work if the VM has snapshots
  • VAAI offload is not supported for virtual machines with space‑efficient disks (for example, thin‑provisioned disks)

VAAI Offload Performance Considerations

The performance of VAAI offload depends on the clone or migration scenario:

  • Clone within the same volume/datastore
    • Uses the Single Instance Storage (SIS) clone Copy Engine (SCE)
    • Deduplication must be enabled on the volume
    • SCE leverages deduplication and writes only metadata, making this extremely fast
  • Clone between two different volumes on the same node
    • Uses the Block Copy Engine (BCE)
    • Performs a full data copy between volumes
    • If the network is not the bottleneck, there may be little or no performance improvement
  • Clone between different nodes
    • Uses the Spin Copy Engine (SpinCE)
    • Performs a full data copy between nodes
    • No additional acceleration is provided beyond offloading the operation to the storage system

Additional Information

References:

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