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5 Replies Last post: Sep 18, 2008 9:18 PM by Pramod  
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Pramod
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Sep 16, 2008 9:53 PM

Limitations of using NFS

What are the limitations of using NFS , and how big the share can be for ESX servers.

Jau-Ling Chou Candidate
Jau-Ling Chou
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Aug 3, 2008
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1. Sep 17, 2008 9:38 AM in response to: Pramod
Re: Limitations of using NFS

the best people (at this conference) to answer this question are probably the guys at the NetApp booth. check them out! we use NFS almost exclusively, for both rootfs and also Oracle, and we're super happy with the results!

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Pramod Candidate
Pramod
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2. Sep 17, 2008 9:49 PM in response to: Jau-Ling Chou
Re: Limitations of using NFS

 

Hi ,

 

 

well that was a good suggesstion, could you please help me out with links to Netapp were in i can get some good documents for the best practice on the NFS storage, sizing and configuration

 

 

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tyrellanthony Candidate
tyrellanthony
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3. Sep 17, 2008 10:31 PM in response to: Pramod
Re: Limitations of using NFS

 

Hi Pramod,

 

 

Check this link out -> http://www.netapp.com/us/library/

 

 

Set the search criteria to "Technical Reports" and simply search for "VMware". There is a best practice guide for VI3 on NetApp that talks about NFS and its benefits. Works like a charm and I have many, many, many customers using it in production environments.

 

 

   

 

 

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Don Mann Candidate
Don Mann
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4. Sep 18, 2008 3:18 PM in response to: tyrellanthony
Re: Limitations of using NFS

 

Here is the link to the NetApp VMware best practices doc

 

 

http://www.netapp.com/us/library/technical-reports/tr-3428.html

 

 

Limitations:

 

 

Delayed support in newer products - SRM is not supporting NFS - VDI Offline or View Offline is not expected to support NFS in the first release.

 

 

Benefits:

 

 

Lack of LUN thrashing challenge - not having to deal with evaluating the amount of VM's on a LUN and their IO load. 

 

 

Not having to deal with SCSI locking challenges of creating/deleting/snapshotting VM's - read VMware storage scalability - http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/scalable_storage_performance.pdf

 

 

Flexibility in growing volumes easily (not having to extent)

 

 

Replication advantages - not having to deal with LUN resignaturing if you are not leveraging SRM

 

 

With NetApp - deduplication is a little easier to leverage the benefits on NFS - you see the space savings in ESX - on block storage the savings is presented to the NetApp system and must be presented back to the ESX host as another LUN.

 

 

just some quick thoughts - I am getting on a plane.

 

 

-don

 

 

 

 

 

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Pramod Candidate
Pramod
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5. Sep 18, 2008 9:18 PM in response to: Don Mann
Re: Limitations of using NFS

 

Hi don

 

 

 

 

 

Thank you so much , that was really helpfull 

 

 

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