What VAAI offloaded operations are supported by Data ONTAP?

Data ONTAP provides native support for the following VAAI operations on SAN storage:
- Copy offload
- Atomic Test & Set (ATS) locking
- Write Same
- Out-of-space condition handling
- Space reclamation
Data ONTAP does not provide native support for VAAI operations on NFS storage (a VMware limitation).
- Note: To add support for NFS VAAI operations, install the Netapp NFS Plug-in for VMware VAAI on the ESXi host(s).
Once the plugin is installed, Data ONTAP can be configured to support the following VAAI operations on NFS storage:
- Creation of thick VMDKs
- Copy offload
For more detailed information on which primitives are supported per protocol and Data ONTAP type, refer to the chart below.

VAAI Category	VAAI Primitive – Description	Data ONTAP 7-Mode (8.2 and later)	Clustered Data ONTAP (8.2 and later)
NAS (Requires NetApp NFS Plugin for VAAI to be installed on ESXi)
Thin provisioning	Extended Statistics – approximate space usage	No	Yes (Unique Block Reporting support is limited)
	Reserve Space – create thick VMDK (lazy or eager zero)	Yes	Yes
Copy offload (VM clone)	Copy within the same volume	Yes	Yes
	Copy between volumes in same vFiler/SVM (same node)	Yes	Yes
	Copy between volumes in same SVM (different node)	N/A	Yes
	Copy between volumes in different SVM, same cluster	N/A	Yes
VM Snapshots	Fast File Clone (Native Snapshot Support)	Yes	Yes
SAN
Thin Provisioning	Write Same – zero disk blocks when new/uninitialized or cloning eager zeroed thick	Yes	Yes
	Out of Space conditions (VMs requesting additional space from thin provisioned datastores that are 100% used will be paused)	Yes	Yes
	Space Reclamation (UNMAP) – manually using esxcli storage vmfs unmap command, or automated in ESXi 6.5	Yes	Yes
Scale	Atomic Test & Set enhanced locking	Yes	Yes
Copy offload (VM clone or Storage vMotion)	Copy within same volume	Yes	Yes
	Copy between volumes in same vFiler/SVM	Yes	Yes
	Copy between volumes in different 7-Mode controllers	No	N/A
	Copy between volumes in different SVM, same cluster	N/A	Yes

Note: Some primitives are only supported in certain circumstances. Refer to the list of caveats below.
- When performing a Storage vMotion on NFS datastores, only cold migration is supported for VAAI copy offload.
  - Live Storage vMotion is not offloaded to storage.
- When performing a copy offload operation on NFS datastores backed by Data ONTAP 8.2.1 7-Mode, copy offload fails to clone files greater than 64GB within the same single-instance storage (SIS) enabled volume.
  - This issue is fixed in 8.2.1P1. For more information, see BUG 807264.
- When using thin provisioning features on SAN datastores, the LUNs must have space allocation enabled.
  - For more information on the space allocation setting, see What does the LUN option space_alloc do?.
  - For more information on enabling space allocation on a LUN, refer to your ONTAP command manual.
- When using copy offload operations on an ESXi 5.0 host, the host may fail with a purple diagnostic screen.
  - The issue has been corrected in ESXi 5.0U2 and later.
  - If you are running one of the affected versions of ESXi and cannot upgrade, disable copy offload.
  - For more information on disabling copy offload, see Disabling Hardware Accelerated Move (XCOPY) in ESXi

For more information on the NetApp NFS Plug-in for VMware VAAI, refer to the Documentation Library.