This means that although there may be alternate connections available for failover, the bandwidth for a single datastore and the underlying storage is limited to what a single connection can provide.
It is important to understand that with NFS version 3 there is only one active pipe for the connection between the ESXi host and a single storage target. Although there are two connections when an NFS datastore is mounted to an ESXi host (one connection for control, the other connection for data), there is still only a single TCP session for I/O. There are still some limits to the multipathing and load-balancing approaches that can be taken. Support for NFS version 4.1 was introduced in vSphere 6.0. NFS version 3 has been supported since the early days of ESXi. VMware supports both NFS version 3 and NFS version 4.1 over TCP/IP. This section explains the different types of network settings and how they work in different VMware NFS versions. For item two, when mounting the NFS storage on the ESXi host(s), one would need to provide the NFS storage target mount point, the IP or hostname of the target, and a datastore name that will be used to identify the NFS storage on the ESXi host(s). With these items addressed, an NFS datastore can now be added to the ESXi host following a similar process to the one used to configure a data store for block based datastores. You will need to populate the network access information. Regarding item one above, to configure the vSwitch for IP storage access you will need to create a new portgroup, indicating it is a VMkernel type connection. For more details on NFS storage options and setup, consult the best practices for VMware provided by your storage vendor. The NFS storage target needs to have been configured to export a mount point that is accessible to the ESXi hosts on a trusted network.Have a virtual switch with a VMkernel NIC configured for IP based storage.This section provides an overview of the steps to provision NFS datastores.īefore NFS storage can be addressed by an ESXi host, the following issues need to be addressed: Overview of the Steps to Provision NFS Datastores It will also provide some troubleshooting tips and tricks. It also examines the myths that exist and will attempt to dispel confusion as to when NFS should and should not be used with vSphere. This paper provides an overview of the considerations and best practices for deployment of VMware vSphere on NFS based storage. VMware offers support for almost all features and functions on NFS-as it does for vSphere on SAN. The capabilities of VMware vSphere™ on NFS are very similar to the VMware vSphere™ on block-based storage. Running vSphere on NFS is a very viable option for many virtualization deployments as it offers strong performance and stability if configured correctly. The significant presence of Network Filesystem Storage (NFS) in the datacenter today has lead to many people deploying virtualization environments with Network Attached Storage (NAS) shared storage resources.įor the purpose of clarity, both NFS and NAS refer to the same type of storage protocol and the terms will be used interchangeably throughout this paper.
This section briefly covers how NFS and NAS have affected the virtualization environment, and why running vSphere on NFS is a very viable option for many virtualization deployments.
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