Many of you will be aware of the new core storage features that were introduced in vSphere 6.5. If not, you can learn about them in this recently published white paper. Without doubt, the feature that has created the most amount of interest is automated unmap (finally, I hear you say!). Now a few readers have asked about the following comment in the automated unmap section.
Automatic UNMAP is not supported on arrays with UNMAP granularity greater than 1MB. Auto UNMAP feature support is footnoted in the VMware Hardware Compatibility Guide (HCL).
So where do you find this info in the HCL? I’ll show you here.
First, navigate to the VMware HCL – Storage/SAN Section. Click here for a direct link.
Next select ESXi 6.5, the vendor of the array, and in the features section, Thin Provisioning. Finally click on “Update and View Results”. This will provide a list of supported arrays and models. In this example, I selected DELL as a vendor. It produced a range of Compellent and EQL arrays. I choose Compellent Storage Center with Array Type FC, as shown below:
Let’s compare this to an iSCSI configuration using the same arrays. Here is the list of iSCSI Compellent configurations, once more detailing the supported driver, firmware, multipathing and fail-over policies associated with this array config.
As you can see, support statements around unmap will continue to change, so check back regularly to see whether or not your array vendor has passed the certification tests required to support automated unmap. Alternatively, speak to your array vendor to find out where they are on the certification path.