When creating a design for our new vSphere 5 environment I found some strange mismatches in supported configurations. Turns out VAAI is supported on VNX and CX4 when used in a vSphere4 environment, but the CX4 has no VAAI support when used in a vSphere 5 environment. VMware suggests disabling VAAI at ESXi level when used with ESXi5 and CX4, but unfortunately this is a per host setting and will also disable VAAI for the VNX, which of course is not desired. I asked the question on twitter and virtualization friend Duco Jaspars jumped in and did some investigation. In his blogpost named “Challenges when upgrading environment with EMC CX4 to vSphere 5 and mixed CX4/VNX environment” he explains how you could disable VAAI for the CX4 only. This great blogpost needs more than just a re-tweet, therefore this blogpost of mine to refer you to Duco’s post. Now go and read it !!!
Challenges when upgrading environment with EMC CX4 to vSphere 5 and mixed CX4/VNX environment by Duco Jaspars.
What kind of issues would one expect if VAAI was left enabled on CX4?
Hi Gabrie,
I blogged about this issue a while ago already. In the end it turned out that EMC would support VAAI for the CX4 even when running vSphere 5.0 if you file an individual RPQ with them. We have it running in production now without any problems . Read the whole story here:
http://v-front.blogspot.de/2012/05/whats-deal-with-emc-cx-arrays-not.html
– Andreas
There is no mention of issues, but it is an unsupported configuration. As a hosting provider, you don’t want to run anything that is not supported.