Dell VxRail™ Appliance 4.7x Administration Guide

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Setting up external NFS storage for a VxRail

Follow these guidelines to set up your VxRail for use with an NFS datastore.

Prerequisites

Many storage products provide NFS services, including including UNity, VNX, Isilon, CloudArray, and Windows/Linux NFS services. These guidelines assume that you have already installed and provisioned your VxRail cluster as well as your external NFS storage server.

About this task

The NFS datastore is created directly from vCenter on your VxRail cluster. A VLAN and a vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS) are used.

Refer to the VMware vSphere documentation, Set Up NFS Storage Environment, for details about NFS storage with ESXi.

Steps

  1. In the vSphere Client click Hosts and Clusters.
    In a VxRail cluster, NFS shared folders can be assigned to all connected nodes.
  2. Click the cluster name in the list.
  3. Click the Related Objects tab and then select Datastores.
  4. Click the Create a New Datastore icon.
    The New Datastore window is displayed.
  5. In the Location window type the datastore name and select the location for the datastore.
  6. In the Type window select NFS.
  7. In the Select NFS version window choose an NFS version.
  8. In the Name and configuration window, specify necessary information to add the external NFS storage.
    For Folder enter the Export Path of external storage array.
  9. In the Host accessibility window, select the hosts in the VxRail cluster that will mount the datastore.
    You can select any or all hosts in the cluster.
  10. In the Ready to complete window, review your entries and then click Finish to complete the datastore creation.
    The new NFS datastore has been created.

Results

After the NFS datastore is created, you can:
  • Provision VMs to the NFS datastore using the vSphere Client
  • Perform standard operations such as Open Console, Power On, Shutdown VM, Suspend VM, and clone VM
  • Migrate VMs between VxRail datastores and NFS datastores

NFS storage can take advantage of VMware Storage DRS features. In maintenance mode, VMs move to another node on the same NFS datastore automatically. The rebooted node is connected to the NFS datastore automatically.

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