topic Re: ONTAP tools for VMware vSphere and Thick Provision VMWare Disks in ONTAP Discussions

ONTAP tools for VMware vSphere and Thick Provision VMWare Disks

BenBrazil — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 11:42:20 GMT

Hi,

Are the ONTAP tools for VMware vSphere a requirement in order to create a thick provisioned disk in VMWare on an NFS provided datastore?

Thanks,

Ben

Re: ONTAP tools for VMware vSphere and Thick Provision VMWare Disks

TMACMD — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 12:07:56 GMT

After you install the VIB

https://mysupport.netapp.com/site/products/all/details/nfsplugin-vmware-vaai/downloads-tab

You should be able to thick provision if needed

Re: ONTAP tools for VMware vSphere and Thick Provision VMWare Disks

wareer — Tue, 06 May 2025 06:21:08 GMT

The NetApp NFS Plug-In for VMware VAAI is a plug-in for ESXi hosts that allows them to use VAAI features with NFS datastores on ONTAP. It supports copy offload for clone operations, space reservation for thick virtual disk files, and snapshot offload. Offloading copy operations to storage is not necessarily faster to complete, but it does reduce network bandwidth requirements and offloads host resources such as CPU cycles, buffers, and queues. You can use ONTAP tools for VMware vSphere to install the plug-in on ESXi hosts or, where supported, vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM).https://docs.netapp.com/us-en/ontap-apps-dbs/vmware/vmware-vsphere-vtools.html#ontap-tools-for-vmware-vsphere