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ONTAP tools for VMware vSphere 10

What's new in ONTAP tools for VMware vSphere 10.6

Contributors netapp-jani jani
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Learn about the new capabilities and enhancements in ONTAP tools for VMware vSphere 10.6.

Granular datastore protection

ONTAP tools 10.6 introduces datastore-level protection, so you can apply protection to selected datastores instead of an entire host cluster.

Key enhancements include:

  • Datastore-level protection for ONTAP systems and ASA r2 systems

  • Automated Failover Duplex (AFD) and asynchronous protection policies

  • Support for iSCSI and FC VMFS datastores

  • Hierarchical consistency groups and fan-out configurations

  • Control over consistency-group membership by selecting which datastores to protect together

  • Uniform and non-uniform AFD protection configurations

  • Ability to modify protection by adding or removing datastores and hosts

  • Datastore protection workflow in the vCenter plug-in

  • Upgrade path from host-cluster protection to datastore-level protection

Audit logging

ONTAP tools 10.6 adds audit logging to improve security and operational traceability.

Audit logging includes:

  • All non-GET REST API calls, including request and response details

  • Discovery jobs, AutoSupport bundle jobs, cleanup jobs, and maintenance console operations

  • Integrity protection for audit log archives, including tamper and delete alerts

  • Syslog forwarding support

These updates support compliance and security requirements.

nconnect support for NFS datastores

ONTAP tools 10.6 adds nconnect support for VMware NFS datastores, enabling multiple parallel TCP connections between ESXi hosts and ONTAP NFS datastores.

This release supports:

  • nconnect for NFSv3 datastores during provisioning

  • nconnect for NFSv4.1 datastores during provisioning with vCenter 8.0U3 and later

  • Modification of the maximum nconnect value on ESXi hosts

This helps improve throughput and NFS datastore performance for multi-VM workloads.

Smaller default deployment with XS profile

ONTAP tools 10.6 introduces a smaller default extra-small (XS) deployment profile to reduce resource overhead and simplify initial deployment.

Enhancements include:

  • XS as the default configuration for initial deployment

  • OVA deployment with optimized default hardware settings

  • Support for datastore provisioning, protection, SRA service enablement, and HA mode with XS

  • Four available deployment profiles in the Manager UI: extra-small (XS), small (S), medium (M), and large (L)

This model provides a lower starting footprint with a clear scale-up path.

Ease of deployment improvement

ONTAP tools 10.6 enables CPU hot add and memory hot plug by default for fresh deployments of the primary ONTAP tools VM.

This eliminates the need to manually enable these settings before or after deployment.

Protection workflow improvement

ONTAP tools 10.6 removes the requirement to manually trigger storage discovery when ONTAP clusters are unavailable, simplifying protection workflows.

Platform and interoperability qualification

ONTAP tools 10.6 expands platform and interoperability support across key ONTAP and VMware releases, enabling seamless NetApp storage integration in VMware environments.

This release aligns with current ONTAP platform configurations and VMware releases, reducing operational complexity during platform upgrades and VMware stack refreshes.

Supportability enhancements

ONTAP tools 10.6 improves troubleshooting and lifecycle management.

Key updates include:

  • Forced delete for unreachable or stale vCenter entries

  • Migration from ntpd to chronyd for time synchronization, with automatic migration of existing NTP server settings during upgrade

  • Maintenance console option to renew internal services certificates, even after expiration

  • Support for both traditional NTP servers and RHEL-based chrony servers over standard NTP protocol (UDP port 123)

For the latest details on version compatibility, refer to NetApp Interoperability Matrix Tool.