ESX over NFS or iSCSI

[mldmld]

Hi,

I read that iscsi is used by many people with esx server and the performance is not so bad with "real" life.

I would like to know why not consider nfs for production environment.

Here my thoughts :

With iSCSI

- ESX must serialize every IO on a VMFS lun.

- Iscsi can use only one Ethernet link at a time. So the limit is 1 Gb/s

With NFS

- ESX can access to all VM concurently

- One can use a VIF (agregate of Ethernet to get more than 1Gb/s)

-Backup a VM is like backuping files. Very easy with NetApp snaphots for instance.

- Snapmirror of VM on a DR site.

So my interrogations are on perfs issue ?

Does anyone have tested NFS on production environnement ? How many VM ?

Thanks

ML

[kcollo]

I have just started using ASIS on a VMware ISCSI volume. We do thin provisioning as well on the NAS. Here is a link to a blog that I put up and will be updating

http://blog.colovirt.com/2008/10/23/netapp-deduplication-a-sis-and-vmware/

Asis has been running on the volume for a few days and there are only 9 virtual machines there. I will be moving over a lot more in the next few weeks. The current compression is as follows:

Filesystem used saved %saved

/vol/vmware/ 96GB 99GB 51%

kevin@colovirt.com

[kcollo]

Got an update. Getting better deduplication. Still moving over development and non critical VMs to the sis volume. This is an ISCSI LUN formatted VMFS.

NAS> df -sh /vol/testVol

Filesystem	used	saved	%saved
/vol/testVol/	519GB	754GB	59%

Saving 749 gig so far! ASIS (NetApp dedipe) setup information can be found here:

[mike_laspina]

Hi,

I'm getting exceptional performance with iSCSI.

[Jae_Ellers]

If you use iSCSI with hardware initiators you can manually load balance to use 2 links at once on the ESX side.

ESX runs great on blades. You just need the right blades. I'd love to hear arguments to the contrary.