This topic applies to Linux.

Starting with release 6.1, Storage Foundation and High Availability (SFHA) Solutions supported SmartIO caching when the SFHA Solutions product was installed in the VMware guest. In this configuration, the SSD devices were local to the host, so vMotion operations could not be supported.

Starting in release 6.2, SFHA Solutions supports the vMotion operations and SmartIO within the VMware guests. This functionality is enabled by a no-cost, no-license configuration of Dynamic Multi-Pathing (DMP) for VMware in ESXi hosts.

In this configuration, DMP for VMware enables the pooling of locally attached devices such as SSDs at the ESXi host layer. The aggregation of the local devices is called SmartPool. From the SmartPool, you can provision SmartDisks to be used as caching areas by SmartIO in the ESXi guests running SFHA. By dividing the SmartPool into several SmartDisks, you can share the caching storage across multiple virtual machines. Using SmartPools gives you the flexibility to move virtual machines across ESXi hosts while SmartIO caching is in progress. Although each host has its own SSD, you can configure each host to have a comparable view of the SmartDisk. When you use vMotion to migrate the virtual machines that have Storage Foundation running, SmartIO shuts down the cache on the source node and restarts the cache on the target host. SmartIO caching stays online during the migration. You can dynamically resize the SmartPool by adding or removing storage devices to the SmartPool.

You can install and use the no-license mode regardless of whether you are using DMP for VMware to manage storage multi-pathing in the host. If you plan to use DMP for VMware for multi-pathing in the host, you must have the appropriate license.

For more information, see the Storage Foundation and High Availability Solutions Virtualization Guide for VMware ESXi.