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FlashSoft I/O Filter VAIO Setup Steps

Last week I had the opportunity to drop down to San Jose and catch up with our friends on the FlashSoft team at SanDisk. In case you were not aware, this team has been developing a cache acceleration I/O filter as part of the VAIO program (VAIO is short for vSphere APIs for I/O Filters). SanDisk were also one of the design partners chosen by VMware for VAIO. This program allows for our partners to plug directly into the VM I/O path, and add third-party data services, such as replication, encryption, quality of service and so on. An interesting observation made by the FlashSoft team is that implementing their acceleration data service via VAIO gives much greater performance than their previous product version which plugs into the Pluggable Storage Architecture (PSA) stack.

Manish, Rich, Serge and Tom gave us another update on the 4.0 version of the FlashSoft product. I had seen this before, as the guys tech previewed it at VMworld 2015 last year. However with the release of FlashSoft 4.0, the guys now have the first certified VAIO I/O Filter on the market. SanDisk are our first certified partner for VAIO. Rich Petersen has a good write-up on the capabilities here on the SanDisk blog.

The guys were also kind enough to give me access to the components and some evaluation licenses, so I could test it out in my own labs. The documentation is pretty good so I won’t go into too much detail. However these are the steps to get going:

And at this point, you should be good to go. The virtual machine disk files using the policy will be automatically accelerated by FlashSoft’s VAIO plugin and physical cache. How simple is that?

Another nice feature is the metric view that the FlashSoft guys have included. It gives you a nice overview of the more important performance statistics related to caching acceleration. Right now this is only a real-time view; there is no historical data. However I think this is something planned going forward.

Considerations

The FlashSoft VAIO implementation is currently a read cache acceleration (write-through) implementation only. Write cache acceleration (write-back) is planned.

One major feature with VAIO is that VMware is now providing full support for VAIO partners. Therefore there is only a single call to make, and the support engineer will have the hooks into partners such as SanDisk to root cause any problems. This is a different approach to the one taken with the PVSP program, where customers may have been requested to work with the partner directly to resolve an issue.

Also note that vFRC can still be used along with VAIO, though  they are mutually exclusive. A given VMDK can only be accelerated using either VAIO or vFRC. Administrators can also share the vFlash Resource (VFFS) space between vFRC and VAIO.

Conclusion

VAIO is the final component that, in my opinion, completes the Software Defined Storage vision. VMware customers now have the ability to consume SDS via VSAN, Virtual Volumes and indeed third-party data services via VAIO. And there are other VAIO filters on the way (FlashSoft/SanDisk are the first of many).

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