VMware VAAI and native snapshots

[jixam]

The VAAI announcement notes "FreeNAS [...] will create ZFS snapshots to replace the VMware snapshots."

What does this mean? We were hoping that creating a snapshot with vSphere Client would cause a Zvol snapshot to be created (or vice versa) but this does not happen.

 

[Mlovelace]

The VAAI announcement notes "FreeNAS [...] will create ZFS snapshots to replace the VMware snapshots."

What does this mean? We were hoping that creating a snapshot with vSphere Client would cause a Zvol snapshot to be created (or vice versa) but this does not happen.

http://doc.freenas.org/11/storage.html#vmware-snapshot

VMware-Snapshot is used to coordinate ZFS snapshots when using FreeNAS as a VMware datastore. Once this type of snapshot is created, FreeNAS will automatically snapshot any running VMware virtual machines before taking a scheduled or manual ZFS snapshot of the dataset or zvol backing that VMware datastore. The temporary VMware snapshots are then deleted on the VMware side but still exist in the ZFS snapshot and can be used as stable resurrection points in that snapshot. These coordinated snapshots will be listed in Snapshots.

 

[jixam]

VMware-Snapshot is used to coordinate ZFS snapshots when using FreeNAS as a VMware datastore.

Okay, so the original quote just describes quiescing (which is not really part of the VAAI support).

I hoped "replace" would mean something different from "coordinate" but fair enough.