VMware VAAI support for HP P2000 G3 & HP MSA 2040

Information

Beginning with the TS251R004 firmware release, the HP MSA VAAI plug-in is no longer supported as the HP MSA controller firmware now uses T10 compliance in an ESX Environment documented in TS251R004.

The HP P2000 G3 and the HP MSA 2040 are two widely used entry-level storage arrays. The P2000 G3 is VAAI capable since firmware version T230. But, contrary to the HP MSA 2040, you have to install the software plug-in for VMware VAAI if you use the P2000 G3. According to the “HP MSA 2040 Storage Configuration and Best Practices for VMware vSphere” whitepaper the MSA 2040 supports VAAI nativly without an additional plugin.

The HP MSA 2040 array natively supports these three primitives, which means an additional MSA plug-in is no longer required with vSphere 5.0 and higher to receive the benefits of VAAI integration.

The issue

Today I ran into this problem while visiting a new customer, which uses several HP ProLiant DL380 G7 with a P2000 G3 and VMware vSphere 5.5. The vSphere client told me that “Hardware Acceleration” was unknown.I checked these options (Configuration tab, click Advanced Settings under Software):

DataMover.HardwareAcceleratedMove
DataMover.HardwareAcceleratedInit
VMFS3.HardwareAcceleratedLocking

All options were set to 1 which means that they are enabled. A quick check with esxcli confirmed this:

# esxcli storage core device vaai status get

naa.600c0ff000da47ef53ef3d880a000000
   VAAI Plugin Name:
   ATS Status: unsupported
   Clone Status: unsupported
   Zero Status: unsupported

That wasn’t what I expected… But I missed to check what kind of image the customer used to install the ESXi 5.5 hosts. In the end the solution was simple: The customer used the VMware vanilla 5.5 image, not the HP customized image. The HP image includes the P2000 G3 VAAI plugin-in, the vanilla image doesn’t include it.

The solution

In this case we had to install the VAAI plug-in. The installation is nothing fancy and it’s a one-liner. Download the plug-in, upload it to the host into the tmp directory, connect using SSH and run:

# esxcli software vib install -d /tmp/hp_vaaip_p2000_offline-bundle-210.zip

Please note that you have to extract the ZIP file after the download! There’s a ZIP file inside the ZIP file. After a reboot the VAAI support should be active:

# esxcli storage core device vaai status get

naa.600c0ff000da47ef53ef3d880a000000
   VAAI Plugin Name: hp_vaaip_p2000
   ATS Status: supported
   Clone Status: supported
   Zero Status: supported