Guidelines and Limitations in Using vSphere Virtual Volumes

For the best experience with vSphere Virtual Volumes functionality, you must follow specific guidelines.

Virtual Volumes supports the following capabilities, features, and VMware products:

• With Virtual Volumes, you can use advanced storage services that include replication, encryption, deduplication, and compression on individual virtual disks. Contact your storage vendor for information about services they support with Virtual Volumes.
• Virtual Volumes functionality supports backup software that uses vSphere APIs - Data Protection. Virtual volumes are modeled on virtual disks. Backup products that use vSphere APIs - Data Protection are as fully supported on virtual volumes as they are on VMDK files on a LUN. Snapshots that the backup software creates using vSphere APIs - Data Protection look as non-VVols snapshots to vSphere and the backup software.
  Note: vSphere Virtual Volumes does not support SAN transport mode. vSphere APIs - Data Protection automatically selects an alternative data transfer method.

  For more information about integration with the vSphere Storage APIs - Data Protection, consult your backup software vendor.

• Virtual Volumes supports such vSphere features as vSphere vMotion, Storage vMotion, snapshots, linked clones, Flash Read Cache, and DRS.
• You can use clustering products, such as Oracle Real Application Clusters, with Virtual Volumes. To use these products, you activate the multiwrite setting for a virtual disk stored on the VVol datastore.

For more details, see the knowledge base article at http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2112039. For a list of features and products that Virtual Volumes functionality supports, see VMware Product Interoperability Matrixes.

vSphere Virtual Volumes Limitations

Improve your experience with vSphere Virtual Volumes by knowing the following limitations:

• Because the Virtual Volumes environment requires vCenter Server, you cannot use Virtual Volumes with a standalone host.
• Virtual Volumes functionality does not support RDMs.
• A Virtual Volumes storage container cannot span multiple physical arrays. Some vendors present multiple physical arrays as a single array. In such cases, you still technically use one logical array.
• Host profiles that contain Virtual Volumes datastores are vCenter Server specific. After you extract this type of host profile, you can attach it only to hosts and clusters managed by the same vCenter Server as the reference host.