NFS again ...

[scooteroc]

I have to build an image-level backup solution using VDR or Trilead and the SAN I have to work with is old and not in the compatiblity list. I thought I would build a couple of NFS servers with that SAN storage attached and use the NFS exports as datastores for the backups. I heard TCP packet encapsulation will affect hypervisor host performance. Can someone describe their experiances with or without theTOE enabled interface along with any other wisdom. It seems that TOE enabled interfaces will resolve perfromance issues but I'd like to know more before I pitch the soluton to management.

[jrmunday]

We use NFS extensively in production and are very happy with the performance/scalibility, especially so because we use it in a NetApp MetroCluster configuration - synchronous replication between DC's that are ~70km apart. We have the datastores presented across site (PROD/DR) for flexibility to over 30 hosts (although only use site local storage) and we haven't seen it affect host performance at all - it is fit for purpose.

With regards to TOE, I only have experience of it in a Windows environment and we generally disable it on all systems with high network utilisation for stability. Not sure how this would translate to in virtualisation, but thought I would throw it out there anyway.

So back to NFS ... it would make sense to plan your network infrastucture to cater for your requirements and test performance to get a benchmark of what your infrastucture is capable of (also ensure that you use aligned IO - this is a must for performance). We segregate NFS traffic on a dedicated layer 2 VLAN which is only exported to the ESXI hosts IP storage interfaces. Obviously, you will get better performance from 10GB than 1GB so this would be good to plan / cater for budget permitting.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Jon