VM-Aware

I have recently been researching the best way to implement VMware ESX using NetApp FAS270 storage.

This has led me all over the internet and beyond trying to ascertain whether NFS is a viable option on these boxes that can have a Fibre Channel and/or iSCSI options.

After a while I realised that not only is a viable option, but it looks like a very good option indeed. NFS with VMware has a multitude of benefits over FCP and iSCSI including:

• Thin Provisioning by default (potentially saving more than 50% of storage)
• Very easy to present new datastores
• NFS volumes can be increased and decreased on the fly
• Not restricted to 2TB LUNs as this is controlled by the filer (up to 16TB with NetApp)
• Bandwidth is less of an issue, due to ESX Server’s random disk I/O

A lot of this was discovered from the following blogs:

• Virtual Optics
• Nick Triantos - Storage Foo

Also during the research I came across a multitude of documents and web sites, the best of which are listed below:

• Network Configuration
• Building Virtual Infrastructure with NAS
• Virtualising NetApp & VMware (German)
• Storage Networking By NetApp & Cisco Systems
• NetApp & VMware VI3 Storage Best Practices
• Making VMware Even Easier To Manager With NetApp

I have of course implemented NFS in VMware many, many times, but never with enterprise boxes such as NetApp. I cannot wait to get this going to be able to leverage all the NetApp software related benefits.

Any progress will be updated on this blog so keep your eyes peeled!

Bookmarks

Tags: NFS, VMware

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 28th, 2008 at 5:33 pm and is filed under Storage, VMware, Virtualisation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.