VM /ETC

Archive for May, 2009

A lot of companies are using NFS as the preferred protocol to shared storage for VMware Virtual Infrastructure. In my personal experience, The administrative options and convenience of NFS is unmatched, and the virtual machine (VM) performance is surprising.

For example, I recently helped migrate a company from ESX 2.X to new a installation of VI 3.5. Since the client did not have any additional space available on their fiber channel (FC) SAN for a new VMFS3 volume, we temporarily used a Windows Server 2003 R2 NFS share to host 2 dozen VMs until the existing FC volumes could be rebuilt and reconnected. The customer actually ran their production environment for 2 weeks in this configuration and was experiencing better performance. Newer hardware for the ESX hosts also contributed to this increase, but the point is that the NFS storage was not a bottleneck.

For those that are considering NFS, I was recently forwarded a list of links that provide sound arguments and testimonials on the unique advantages of using NFS with VMware. Although the published date of some of the posts that are referenced might be a bit dated, the content is still valid. Here is the list with quotes from some of the posts, but be sure to read the all in full for more information. Read the rest of this entry »