VM-Aware » NFS http://www.vm-aware.com Server, Storage & Application Virtualisation! Mon, 13 Feb 2012 14:45:06 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v= en hourly 1 Who Loves NFS?!? http://www.vm-aware.com/2008/05/who-loves-nfs/ http://www.vm-aware.com/2008/05/who-loves-nfs/#comments Sun, 18 May 2008 15:31:26 +0000 Paul Shannon http://www.vm-aware.com/?p=84 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.

]]> http://www.vm-aware.com/2008/05/who-loves-nfs/feed/ 0 VMware & NFS http://www.vm-aware.com/2008/02/vmware-nfs/ http://www.vm-aware.com/2008/02/vmware-nfs/#comments Thu, 28 Feb 2008 16:33:19 +0000 Paul Shannon http://www.vm-aware.com/blog/2008/02/28/vmware-nfs/ 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:

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

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!

]]> http://www.vm-aware.com/2008/02/vmware-nfs/feed/ 1 NFS Storage In VMware http://www.vm-aware.com/2007/09/30/ http://www.vm-aware.com/2007/09/30/#comments Tue, 25 Sep 2007 08:58:27 +0000 Paul Shannon http://www.vm-aware.com/blog/?p=30 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
The presentation mentioned can be downloaded here.

Hope you find it as interesting as I did.

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