ONTAP QoS and VMware vSphere Storage I/O Control (SIOC) are complementary technologies that vSphere and storage administrators can use together to manage performance of vSphere VMs hosted on systems running ONTAP software. Each tool has its own strengths, as shown in the following table. Because of the different scopes of VMware vCenter and ONTAP, some objects can be seen and managed by one system and not the other.

VMware Storage Distributed Resource Scheduler (SDRS) is a vSphere feature that places VMs on storage based on the current I/O latency and space usage. It then moves the VM or VMDKs nondisruptively between the datastores in a datastore cluster (also referred to as a pod), selecting the best datastore in which to place the VM or VMDKs in the datastore cluster. A datastore cluster is a collection of similar datastores that are aggregated into a single unit of consumption from the vSphere administrator's perspective.

When using SDRS with ONTAP tools for VMware vSphere, you must first create a datastore with the plug-in, use vCenter to create the datastore cluster, and then add the datastore to it. After the datastore cluster is created, additional datastores can be added to the datastore cluster directly from the provisioning wizard on the Details page.

Other ONTAP best practices for SDRS include the following:

VMware vSphere APIs for Storage Awareness (VASA) make it easy for a storage administrator to configure datastores with well-defined capabilities and let the VM administrator use those whenever needed to provision VMs without having to interact with each other. It's worth taking a look at this approach to see how it can streamline your virtualization storage operations and avoid a lot of trivial work.

Prior to VASA, VM administrators could define VM storage policies, but they had to work with the storage administrator to identify appropriate datastores, often by using documentation or naming conventions. With VASA, the storage administrator can define a range of storage capabilities, including performance, tiering, encryption, and replication. A set of capabilities for a volume or a set of volumes is called a storage capability profile (SCP).

The SCP supports minimum and/or maximum QoS for a VM's data vVols. Minimum QoS is supported only on AFF systems. ONTAP tools for VMware vSphere includes a dashboard that displays VM granular performance and logical capacity for vVols on ONTAP systems.

The following figure depicts ONTAP tools for VMware vSphere 9.8 vVols dashboard.

After the storage capability profile is defined, it can be used to provision VMs using the storage policy that identifies its requirements. The mapping between the VM storage policy and the datastore storage capability profile allows vCenter to display a list of compatible datastores for selection. This approach is known as storage policy based management.

VASA provides the technology to query storage and return a set of storage capabilities to vCenter. VASA vendor providers supply the translation between the storage system APIs and constructs and the VMware APIs that are understood by vCenter. NetApp's VASA Provider for ONTAP is offered as part of the ONTAP tools for VMware vSphere appliance VM, and the vCenter plug-in provides the interface to provision and manage vVol datastores, as well as the ability to define storage capability profiles (SCPs).

ONTAP supports both VMFS and NFS vVol datastores. Using vVols with SAN datastores brings some of the benefits of NFS such as VM-level granularity. Here are some best practices to consider, and you can find additional information in TR-4400:

The following figure shows vVols components.

Another ONTAP strength is broad support for the hybrid cloud, merging systems in your on-premises private cloud with public cloud capabilities. Here are some NetApp cloud solutions that can be used in conjunction with vSphere:

When designing your VM-based applications, consider future cloud mobility. For example, rather than placing application and data files together use a separate LUN or NFS export for the data. This allows you to migrate the VM and data separately to cloud services.

Today, there are increasing demands to protect data at rest through encryption. Although the initial focus was on financial and healthcare information, there is growing interest in protecting all information, whether it's stored in files, databases, or other data types.

Systems running ONTAP software make it easy to protect any data with at-rest encryption. NetApp Storage Encryption (NSE) uses self-encrypting disk drives with ONTAP to protect SAN and NAS data. NetApp also offers NetApp Volume Encryption and NetApp Aggregate Encryption as a simple, software-based approach to encrypt volumes on any disk drives. This software encryption doesn't require special disk drives or external key managers and is available to ONTAP customers at no additional cost. You can upgrade and start using it without any disruption to your clients or applications, and they are validated to the FIPS 140-2 level 1 standard, including the onboard key manager.

There are several approaches for protecting the data of virtualized applications running on VMware vSphere. One approach is to protect the data with software inside the VM at the guest OS level. Newer hypervisors such as vSphere 6.5 now support encryption at the VM level as another alternative. However, NetApp software encryption is simple and easy and has these benefits:

It's simple to get started with software encryption. After the license is installed, simply configure the onboard key manager by specifying a passphrase and then either create a new volume or do a storage-side volume move to enable encryption. NetApp is working to add more integrated support for encryption capabilities in future releases of its VMware tools.

Active IQ Unified Manager provides visibility into the VMs in your virtual infrastructure and enables monitoring and troubleshooting storage and performance issues in your virtual environment.

A typical virtual infrastructure deployment on ONTAP has various components that are spread across compute, network, and storage layers. Any performance lag in a VM application might occur due to a combination of latencies faced by the various components at the respective layers.

The following screenshot shows the Active IQ Unified Manager Virtual Machines view.

Unified Manager presents the underlying sub-system of a virtual environment in a topological view for determining whether a latency issue has occurred in the compute node, network, or storage. The view also highlights the specific object that causes the performance lag for taking remedial steps and addressing the underlying issue.

The following screenshot shows the AIQUM expanded topology.