VM-Aware

The answer to this should be everyone. Working as a Virtualisation Consultant brings about all kinds of questions from customers and recently I have been getting lots of storage related questions.

Customers want to know what storage protocol they should be using. FC or iSCSI are the usual choices when this question is asked, seldom do they mention NFS.  However, a customer recently mentioned that they had a NetApp filer and they currently use CIFS & NFS for Windows & Linux servers, but were thinking of buying the iSCSI license specifically for ESX. I managed to convince them to go ahead with a Proof of Concept pilot using NFS as the transport protocol, instead of diving straight into iSCSI. (more…)

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.

(more…)

I heard a lot of talk about using NFS at VMworld, but dismissed it out of hand. This was until I saw a demonstration on the NetApp stand, for which I found a blog entry, going over the theory:

http://storagefoo.blogspot.com/2007/09/vmware-over-nfs.html (more…)