I've been trialling using a NFS datastore with ESXi 3.5 (3.5.0 158869). I've hit a number of issues, most resolved, and I'm at least now able to add a NFS datastore and import/create VMs. However I'm seeing problems around NFS recovery in the event of problems with the NFS server (ESXi marks the datastore as inactive after the reboot, only resolution I have is rebooting ESXi server itself).

Anyway - I've been trawling network captures and I think I have a combination of a fussy NAS NFS server, but also a badly behaved ESXi NFS/RPC client. What I see is that the RPC call from ESXi declares the machine name to be "localhost" (i.e. the AUTH UNIX credentials, Machine Name value). I well behaved client should fill in its hostname there, to identify itself to the NFS server.

I'm not sure whether this is a bug in the ESXi NFS client, or is it something in my ESXi configuration..

I have checked the following on ESXi server:

~ # hostname

~ # cat /etc/hosts

# Do not remove the following line, or various programs

# that require network functionality will fail.

127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost

192.168.12.210 esx1.cl-au.local esx1

192.168.13.161 esx1NASNET

(Note - I've manually added the entry for the 192.168.13.x address, which is a NIC dedicated to the NAS. However I have tested with the NAS on the "primary" 192.168.12 address and seen the same behaviour).

I'm thinking that the NFS client incorrectly pulls the hostname from somewhere else?

Any help appreciated!

cheers

Simon