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All PowerStore releases support general file systems. General file systems should be used for all file use cases except for VMware NFS datastores.
Starting with PowerStoreOS 3.0, an option to create a VMware file system is added. VMware file systems are designed and optimized to be used as VMware NFS datastores. VMware file systems support AppSync for VMware NFS, Virtual Storage Integrator (VSI), hardware acceleration, and VM awareness in PowerStore Manager. The file system type selection in the file system provisioning wizard appears in Figure 31.
When provisioning a VMware file system, you can configure Host IO Size. To maximize performance, configure it to match the application I/O size. The available options are 8K, 16K, 32K, and 64K. For general VMware NFS datastores, use the default setting of 8K. The file system type and host I/O size settings are specified during creation and cannot be changed afterwards.
For existing file systems, you can identify the file system type in PowerStore Manager by going to Storage > File Systems and reviewing the Config Type column. In addition, you can view the configured host I/O size by clicking Modify, as shown in Figure 33.
PowerStore monitors the IOs that are sent to a VMware file system over the previous 24-hour period. If more than 50 percent of the IOs are a different size than the configured host IO size, or are not aligned properly, PowerStore Manager displays a warning. If there are less than 86,400 IOs received over the 24-hour period (1 IOPS), this check is skipped.
VMware file systems support vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI), which are storage primitives that enable offloading storage operations from the host to the storage system. To leverage VAAI, the PowerStore NAS VAAI plug-in must be installed on the ESXi host. The following VAAI primitives are supported:
PowerStore Manager provides insight into the VMware environment for VMware file systems. The name of the datastore in vSphere is displayed in PowerStore Manager, enabling administrators to correlate the resources easily, as shown in Figure 34. In PowerStore Manager, go to Storage > File Systems and enable the Datastore column.
In addition, administrators can view the VMs that are stored on this datastore, as shown in Figure 35. In PowerStore Manager, go to Storage > File Systems > file system properties > Virtual Machines.
VMware file systems are optimized for performance in VMware environments. On VMware file systems, metadata updates occur asynchronously because they are not critical for VMware NFS datastores. This behavior enables improved efficiency and performance on the file system.
VMware file system interoperability
VMware file systems do not support quotas and File-Level Retention (FLR), because these features are not required for VMware NFS datastores.