At the time of publication, NetApp provides full support for these release families:

NetApp ONTAP has broad support for vSphere ESXi hosts. The four major release families just described (9.5, 9.6, 9.7, and 9.8) are fully supported as data storage platforms for recent vSphere releases, including 6.0, 6.5, and 7.0 (including updates for these releases). NFS v3 interoperability is broadly defined, and NetApp supports any client, including hypervisors, that is compliant with the NFS v3 standard. NFSv4.1 support is limited to vSphere 6.0 through 7.0.

For SAN environments, NetApp conducts extensive testing of SAN components. In general, NetApp supports standard X86-64 rack servers and Cisco UCS servers together with standard Ethernet adapters for iSCSI connections. FC, FCoE, and NVMe/FC environments have more specifically defined support due to the HBA firmware and drivers needed.

Always check the NetApp Interoperability Matrix to confirm support for a specific hardware and software configuration.

This plug-in for ESXi hosts helps by offloading operations to ONTAP using VAAI. The latest release, 1.1.2, includes support for NFSv4.1 datastores, including Kerberos (krb5 and krb5i) support. It is supported with ESXi 6.0, 6.5, and 7.0 together with ONTAP 9.5-9.8.

NetApp’s VASA Provider supports vVol provisioning and management (see section 3.7). Recent VASA Provider releases support ESXi 6.0, 6.5, and 7.0 together with ONTAP 9.5-9.8.

ONTAP tools for VMware vSphere is key for managing ONTAP storage together with vSphere (using it is a best practice). The latest release, 9.8, is supported with vSphere 6.5 and 7.0 together with ONTAP 9.5-9.8.