Vmware Vstorage Api For Array Integration Support - IBM DS8882F Introduction And Planning Manual

Three tiers
Manual volume or pool rebalance
Auto-rebalancing
Rank depopulations
Thin provisioning
Easy Tier provides a performance monitoring capability, regardless of whether the
Easy Tier feature is activated. Easy Tier uses the monitoring process to determine
what data to move and when to move it when you use automatic mode. You can
enable monitoring independently (with or without the Easy Tier feature activated)
for information about the behavior and benefits that can be expected if automatic
mode were enabled.
Data from the monitoring process is included in a summary report that you can
download to your local system.

VMware vStorage API for Array Integration support

The storage system provides support for the VMware vStorage API for Array
Integration (VAAI).
The VAAI API offloads storage processing functions from the server to the storage
system, reducing the workload on the host server hardware for improved
performance on both the network and host servers.
The following operations are supported:
Atomic test and set or VMware hardware-assisted locking
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DS8882F Introduction and Planning Guide
Using three tiers (each representing a separate drive class) and efficient
algorithms improves system performance and cost effectiveness.
You can select from four drive classes to create up to three tiers. The drives
within a tier must be homogeneous.
Volume rebalancing relocates the smallest number of extents of a volume
and restripes those extents on all available ranks of the extent pool.
Automatically balances the workload of the same storage tier within both
the homogeneous and the hybrid pool that is based on usage to improve
system performance and resource use. Use the auto-rebalancing functions
of Easy Tier to manage a combination of homogeneous and hybrid pools,
including relocating hot spots on ranks. With homogeneous pools, systems
with only one tier can use Easy Tier technology to optimize their RAID
array usage.
Allows ranks that have extents (data) allocated to them to be unassigned
from an extent pool by using extent migration to move extents from the
specified ranks to other ranks within the pool.
Support for the use of thin provisioning is available on ESE and standard
volumes. The use of TSE volumes (FB and CKD) is not supported.
The hardware-assisted locking feature uses the VMware Compare and
Write command for reading and writing the volume's metadata within a
single operation. With the Compare and Write command, the storage
system provides a faster mechanism that is displayed to the volume as an
atomic action that does not require locking the entire volume.