vSphere 4.1 and EMC - VAAI - Hardware Accelerated Full Copy
This is a demonstration of the effect of the new vStorage API for Array Integration (VAAI) in vSphere 4.1 in combination with EMC Unified Storage platform support for these hardware offloads.
Specifically, it shows the "before" and "after" of enabling hardware acceleration of Storage VMotion via the Fast Copy API. This new feature - requiring vSphere 4.1 and platform support like that in the EMC Unified (July) and VMAX platforms (Q4) issues a single command (SCSI Extended Copy) instead of the old way (many, MANY repeated SCSI read/write commands) - accomplishing cloning, deploy from template and storage vmotion tasks much faster, using fewer array and ESX resources, enabling higher degrees of efficiency and consolidation.