Does ISCSI offer ANYTHING over NFS?

[mikemcsw]

For the home lab, I got a cheap 2TB IOMEGA IX2 NAS ($250) and got it successfully configured as both ISCSI and NFS.

The main reason i wanted it was to fileshare ISO's and to backup VMs, which NFS seems better suited to do.

My question is should I keep this ISCSI partition for anything? Does it offer anything over NFS? I don't need any extra HD space to create and run VM's on...I have plenty of internal SATA space.

[J1mbo]

You don't need to worry about partition alignment so much with iSCSI.

Apart from this NFS is in many respects superior. For example, there is no delete option in iSCSI (being SCSI over IP), so storage-layer thin provisioning is difficult to reclaim. In realtity the protocols are also very similar 'on the wire'.

However iSCSI has a perception advantage since that term has always been known to imply performance. Many looking at vmware won't have used NFS before.

http://blog.peacon.co.uk

Please award points to any useful answer.