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January 8th, 2012 12:00
VNXe with VMware: iSCSI or NFS (and why?)
Hi.
We're expecting the delivery of our first VNXe in the next week or so which we'll be using for hosting VMware datastores.
We will need to decide whether to deploy our datastores on iSCSI or NFS and I'd be interested in finding out what other VNXe users are doing - and why.
Our current VMware infrastructure is based on NetApp and we're very happy using NFS. Our previous environment was running on FC, so we're comfortable with both block and file.
Are there any obvious pros/cons we need to consider that may sway the decision?
Any feedback appreciated! Thanks!
JR
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pkilian-chipmancorp.com
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63 Posts
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January 9th, 2012 08:00
JR,
I can only comment on my environment. I purchased the array when it was first announced back in May with the intention of using it to host VMWare data stores only. I wanted to use NFS shares because of the simplicity of NFS and the ease of use. After setting up NFS datastores and running some I/O Meter performance test, I was very disappointed with the results. I opened a ticket with EMC and while they were working on it, I decided to set up an iSCSI share. I ran the exact same I/O Meter performance test on the same VM on the iSCSI share and got much better performance.
This seemed to be different than what VMWare was telling their customers and even some people in this forum told me that NFS could never be as fast as iSCSI. Well it turns out that EMC found an issue with the software and sent out a change. Once the software was installed, I re-ran the performance test on both the NFS and iSCSI datastores and found out that in this test at least, NFS performed slightly better than iSCSI, but slight enough to be insignificant.
Both NFS and iSCSI were just plain vanilla, so there may be some advanced options that make iSCSI a better choice, but in my environment, NFS works well for me. I have a VNXe3100, dual SP's with 12, 300GB disks in a performance pool of RAID 5. I've got about 10 VM running on two datastores, mostly Windows Server 2003 R2 doing typical Office applications under Terminal Server for about 150 users.
Best Regards.
ll3d2014
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October 25th, 2014 02:00
what is the performance gain compared with iSCSI ?
Shivanand1
70 Posts
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October 25th, 2014 02:00
Hi JR,
Below are few differences,
1) With iSCSI you can create a datastore with maximum size of 2TB while for NFS it is 16 TB.
2) With iSCSI you can configure boot from iSCSI which is not supported in NFS.
3) You can set MTU to 9000 in iSCSI.
4) Personally I have seen most of the customers opt for iSCSI for their ESX environment compared to NFS.
Note: There is no support for FC in VNXe models.
Regards
Shivanand
ll3d2014
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October 25th, 2014 02:00
Will there be a VAAI plugin available for iSCSI soon ?