There are not many reasons why you want to disable VAAI on your ESXi hosts…
But sometimes you have to… for example, if you need performance logs to compare VAAI and non-VAAI behavior on your NetApp Storage *grr*
You can enable and disable VAAI on your ESXi Hosts via commandline or using the vSphere client. At the end of the post you can find a PowerCli Snippet to enable/disable VAAI.
How to – enable/disable VAAI via command line:
If you prefer the commandline you can use the command “esxcfg-advcfg” to manage your VAAI settings.
To view if VAAI is enabled or disabled, use the option -g for every VAAI primitive:
(returnvalue 1 = enabled)
esxcfg-advcfg -g /DataMover/HardwareAcceleratedMove
esxcfg-advcfg -g /DataMover/HardwareAcceleratedInit
esxcfg-advcfg -g /VMFS3/HardwareAcceleratedLocking
To disable VAAI for a dedicated primitive use the option “-s 0”:
esxcfg-advcfg -s 0 /DataMover/HardwareAcceleratedMove
To enable VAAI again use the option “-s 1”:
esxcfg-advcfg -s 1 /DataMover/HardwareAcceleratedMove
How to – enable/disable VAAI via vSphere Client:
Open your vSphere Client, select a host and change to the “Configuration Tab”. Under “Software”, click “Advanced Settings”.
Select “DataMover” in the Advanced-Settings-Tree – now you can disable/enable HardwareAcceleratedMove and HardwareAcceleratedInit by changing the value to 0 or 1:
To enable/disable HardwareAcceleratedLocking select “VMFS3” in the Advanced-Settings-Tree and change the value “VMFS3.HardwareAcceleratedLocking”:
PowerCli Snippet to enable/disable VAAI:
You can view the current VAAI status from an ESXi Host using this PowerCli code:
(just replace vCenter_name and FQDN_of_VMHost | status 0 = disabled, Status 1 = enabled)
Connect-VIServer vCenter_name
Get-VMHost FQDN_of_VMHost | Get-VMHostAdvancedConfiguration -Name DataMover.HardwareAccelerated*, VMFS3.HardwareAccelerated*
You can disable VAAI on an ESXi Host using this code:
(just replace vCenter_name and FQDN_of_VMHost | Value 0 = disable VAAI, Value 1 = enable VAAI)
$VMHost = Get-VMHost FQDN_of_VMHost
Set-VMHostAdvancedConfiguration -VMHost $VMHost -Name DataMover.HardwareAcceleratedMove -Value 0
Set-VMHostAdvancedConfiguration -VMHost $VMHost -Name DataMover.HardwareAcceleratedInit -Value 0
Set-VMHostAdvancedConfiguration -VMHost $VMHost -Name VMFS3.HardwareAcceleratedLocking -Value 0