User manual

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Virtualization
QNAP business-class Turbo NAS is a virtualization-ready storage solution designed to
optimize your virtualization operations. In addition to the support for VMware vSphere,
Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer, this storage solution includes the cutting edge VAAI
for iSCSI, VAAI for NAS and ODX (Offloaded Data Transfer) technologies to offload the
heavy-duty file operations from the servers and flexible volume management approaches,
such as Thin Provisioning and Space Reclaim, to manage your volumes more effectively. To
double system performance, QNAP offers a number of network accessories that support
10Gbe transmission speeds and the SSD Cache feature that capitalizes on SSD technologies.
Besides, the remarkable QNAP vSphere Client and QNAP SMI-S Provider are available to
increase management productivity and efficiency.
Note: Each feature mentioned in this chapter is applicable only to specific models. Please
refer to each respective section for supported models.
Server Virtualization
The Turbo NAS supports three types of server virtualization applications: VMware vSphere,
Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer. For details on each of the solutions and supported
models, check here.
VAAI for iSCSI and VAAI for NAS
The Turbo NAS supports VMware VAAI (vStorage APIs for Array Integration) to increase
operational performance in virtualization environments. With VAAI, data processing is
offloaded to the Turbo NAS, and standard virtual machine management and deployment can
be performed more efficiently, consuming less ESXi CPU, memory, and bandwidth resources.
VAAI includes two parts: 1) VAAI for iSCSI and 2) VAAI for NAS.
VAAI for iSCSI supports the following four features:
 Full Copy (hardware-assisted copy): Processes the full copies of data within the Turbo
NAS without requiring that the EXSi host reads and writes the data. This feature can
reduce the loading for ESXi hosts and speed up the cloning process for virtual machines;
 Block Zeroing (hardware-assisted zeroing): Enables Turbo NAS to zero out a large
number of blocks to speed up the provisioning of virtual machines. This feature can reduce
the loading for ESXi hosts and increase capacity allocation efficiency for virtual machines;