Aggregate dedupe VAAI Copy offload

[amayacitta]

Hi all,

Does anyone know if the VAAI NAS Full File Clone Primitive works across volumes with aggregate dedupe in 9.6?

Not tried it yet, so thought i'd ask.

[Ontapforrum · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Yes, I don't see any issue with it.

As far as 'VAAI NAS – Full file clone' concerned, according to KB below, it is supported 5.x onwards and according to IMT all 9.x supports it. VAAI NAS Full file clone enables the Storage array host to make full copies of data (vmdk files) within the NAS array without using the ESX resources to read and write the data.

Starting from ESXi 5.x, support for NAS Hardware Acceleration is included with support for these primitives:
https://kb.netapp.com/app/answers/answer_view/a_id/1002650

For cross-volume deduplication (IAD) :  If this feature co-exists with IAD ? I don't see any issue here. Is your query .

Only caveats for IAD:
All volumes must be thin-provisioned (space guarantee set to None) for IAD to work.
IAD is not supported with NetApp Volume Encryption (NVE)*

*Starting in ONTAP 9.6, NetApp has included a new feature called NetApp Aggregate Encryption (NAE), which assigns keys at the aggregate level, hence encrypting all volumes within the aggregate. This not only simplifies encryption management, as there are less objects to manage, it also allows volumes to be encrypted and deduplicated at the aggregate level.

https://www.netapp.com/us/media/tr-4476.pdf

Thanks!

[amayacitta]

Cool i'll give it ago, waiting for 7MTT to finish, until then they are still on 9.5. Once on 9.6 i'll put aggregate dedupe, aggregate encryption, then try it out.

This would be similar to a SolidFire with it's global dedupe metadata disk. Savings no matter what volume the data is in 🙂 hurah.

[Blissitt]

Did you ever test this successfully, and if so, how?  I've just recently gotten my VMware hosts moved to an AFF-A300.  Deduplication is enabled on the volumes and the aggregates and the VAAI plug-in is installed on the hosts.  When copying a VMDK or cloning a VM *within* a NetApp volume, it's lightning-fast, but doing the same across volumes in the same aggregate is relatively slow.  I don't know if I'm getting at least some benefit (reduced load on hosts, etc.) or if I'm getting no benefit.

[juanmaverick]

I'm running into this same problem.   Running on an AFF-A700, VAAI clones are almost instant on the same volume, but when the destination is a different volume on the same aggregate, the copy operation takes significantly longer.    You would think that since cross-volume deduplication is a thing in the aggregate we'd be able to have cross-volume instant clones.

[Blissitt]

Have you tried running esxtop and monitoring the Network screen on your ESXi hosts while you clone your VM?  If I do this while cloning a VM to a different volume on the same aggregate, the copy operation takes a long time, but I don't see increased network traffic on my host in esxtop.  So maybe there is heavy lifting being done, but it's all on the storage side and the hosts/network are not impacted (just guessing here).