Storage: 10Gbit NFS or 4Gbit FC

[berndmaier]

Hi,

i have a short strategy-question:

I want to use a Netapp 31XX Storage for our virtual environment.

my question is now the connection to the esx-servers.

we have onboard 4gbit FC on the netapp and a extension-card for 10gbit ethernet (2-ports)

on the esx-servers we have actually "only" 2 10gbit ethernet ports...

now i dont know on with connection-type i get better performance:

• a dedicated 10gbit ethernet connection for NFS
• a dedicated 4Gbit FC connection

My Netapp consolutant has told me about the VMware feature to see the "reserved disk-space" from deduplication by using NFS...

this is very nice in my opinion...

but the bigger question for me is the performance.

could anybody told me about this two connection-types.

best regards,

bernd

[Cooldude09]

it depends on ur requirement. if you need file level access , nfs will suffice the purpose, else FC.

if you ethernet cards supports fcoE, use that

[berndmaier]

no my ethernet cards dont support FCoe, for this i have to buy new cards...

i want to use the netapp only for ESX-Datastores to store virtual machines...

[Cooldude09]

refer this http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/storage_protocol_perf.pdf

also this http://communities.vmware.com/thread/181896

i would recommend for NFS

[murphyslaw1978b]

Fiber Channel uses the 8b/10b encoding scheme vs. the DCE 10G, which uses the 64b/66b encoding type, so you are really comparing 3.2Gbps vs. 9.6Gbps (a 300% difference).  From a protocol perspective, the 10GB NFS will be faster.