How are you setting up your NFS server to work with vsphere?

Question

For those that have already setup their VNXe 3100 SAN with NFS, I would like to know how most of you are setting it up. Are you just creating the 2 NFS Servers, one for each storage processor? And then creating multiple NFS datastores for each one? OR are you creating more than the 2 shared storage servers.

I have gathered bits and pieces of information together from the HA guide and from some other posts, and hence going with the setup below.

I am thinking about just going with the 2 servers with multiple datastore on each and hoping this would be sufficient for load balancing the traffic.

My ESXi host would only have 2 pNICs dedicated to IP storage. The SAN I am most likely going to aggregate eth 10-13 together.

Thanks for your feedback and input.

Henriwithani · Answer

One NFS server / SP / LAG and multiple datastores on it would be the way to go. More details about the LAG and ESX configuration on this document:

https://community.emc.com/docs/DOC-14239

@henriwithani

pkilian-chipmancorp.com · Answer

myzyr,

I have set up two NFS Folder shares, one on each SP. I then created 2 NFS Data Stores, one on each NFS Folder. I have aggregated eth2 and eth3. I am currently running 4 Windows 2003 R2 Terminal Server to support about 100 terminal server users, plus a Windows 2008 Sharepoint server that is also acting as a file server. I've got a couple of lightly used Linux servers and a couple of Windows 2008 R2 servers that will eventually be used to replace the Terminal Servers. All of my VM's are thin provisioned.

For the most part, my users have not noticed any real performance issues as compared to a similar setup with physical servers and local hard drives. On the System Performance tab in Unisphere, CPU activity rarely gets above 20% and the network and volume activity how under 5 Mibs with occasional spike to 15.

Best Regards.

Paul

VNX

How are you setting up your NFS server to work with vsphere?

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