Virtualization tools for ONTAP
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NetApp offers several standalone software tools that can be used together with ONTAP and vSphere to manage your virtualized environment.
The following tools are included with the ONTAP license at no additional cost. See Figure 1 for a depiction of how these tools work together in your vSphere environment.
ONTAP tools for VMware vSphere
ONTAP tools for VMware vSphere is a set of tools for using ONTAP storage together with vSphere. The vCenter plug-in, formerly known as the Virtual Storage Console (VSC), simplifies storage management and efficiency features, enhances availability, and reduces storage costs and operational overhead, whether you are using SAN or NAS. It uses best practices for provisioning datastores and optimizes ESXi host settings for NFS and block storage environments. For all these benefits, NetApp recommends using these ONTAP tools as a best practice when using vSphere with systems running ONTAP. It includes a server appliance, user interface extensions for vCenter, VASA Provider, and Storage Replication Adapter. Nearly everything in ONTAP tools can be automated by using simple REST APIs, consumable by most modern automation tools.
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vCenter UI extensions. The ONTAP tools UI extensions simplify the job of operations teams and vCenter admins by embeding easy-to-use, context-sensitive menus for managing hosts and storage, informational portlets, and native alerting capabilities directly in the vCenter UI for streamlined workflows.
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VASA Provider for ONTAP. The VASA Provider for ONTAP supports the VMware vStorage APIs for Storage Awareness (VASA) framework. It is supplied as part of ONTAP tools for VMware vSphere as a single virtual appliance for ease of deployment. VASA Provider connects vCenter Server with ONTAP to aid in provisioning and monitoring VM storage. It enables VMware Virtual Volumes (vVols) support, management of storage capability profiles and individual VM vVols performance, and alarms for monitoring capacity and compliance with the profiles.
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Storage Replication Adapter. The SRA is used together with VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) to manage data replication between production and disaster recovery sites and test the DR replicas nondisruptively. It helps automate the tasks of discovery, recovery, and reprotection. It includes both an SRA server appliance and SRA adapters for the Windows SRM server and SRM appliance.
The following figure depicts ONTAP tools for vSphere.
NFS Plug-In for VMware VAAI
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).