DELL Unity: Hardware acceleration is shown as not supported for NFS4.1 data stores

Summary: Hardware acceleration is shown as not supported for NFS4.1 data stores (User Correctable)

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Symptoms

Hardware acceleration feature is used to enable Thick Lazy Zeroed/Thick Eager Zeroed disk provisioning for VMs built on NFS Datastores, so on.
By default these options are unavailable as NFS-based Datastores only allow the creation of the Thin provisioned VMDKs.

  • VSphere 6.7 should support hardware acceleration for both NFS3 and NFS4.1, reference document:

  • Also VAAI 3.0.1 should support both

  • If only NFSv4 is enabled on NAS server, this feature does not work for NFSv4 datastores

    root@esx1:~] esxcli storage nfs41 list
Volume Name Host(s) Share Accessible Mounted Read-Only Security isPE Hardware Acceleration
------------- --------------------- -------------- ---------- ------- --------- -------- ----- ---------------------
............................................................ true true false AUTH_SYS false Not Supported>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> unity NFS4.1 data store

  • However, if only NFSv3 is enabled on NAS server, hardware acceleration is enabled for NFSv3 datastores as expected

    [root@esx1:~] esxcli storage nfs list
Volume Name Host Share Accessible Mounted Read-Only isPE Hardware Acceleration
------------- -------------------- -------------- ---------- ------- --------- ----- ---------------------
..................................................................... true true false false Supported
......................................................................... true true false false Supported >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> unity NFS3 data store

 

Cause

There is a module on Unity named VAAI_Enable and this module uses NFSv3 to support hardware acceleration.

 

Resolution

If NFSv4.1 datastore must support hardware acceleration, NFSv3 must be enabled on NAS server too.

Array side:

  1. Create a NAS Server, select both sharing protocols NFSv3, NFSv4.1 together
  2. Create NFS datastore

ESXi host side:
Add a datastore of nfsv41, as per the example below:

esxcli storage nfs41 add --hosts=IP --share=share folder_for_test_vaai --volume-name=

 

Affected Products

Dell Unity 300, Dell EMC Unity 300F, Dell EMC Unity 350F, Dell EMC Unity 400F, Dell EMC Unity 450F, Dell EMC Unity 500, Dell EMC Unity 500F, Dell EMC Unity 550F, Dell EMC Unity 600, Dell EMC Unity 600F

Products

Dell EMC Unity 650F, Dell EMC Unity Family |Dell EMC Unity All Flash, Dell EMC Unity Family, Dell EMC Unity Hybrid
Article Properties
Article Number: 000081887
Article Type: Solution
Last Modified: 21 Oct 2025
Version:  3
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