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AllBlack
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NFS Volumes best practice

Hi guys,

Our netapp is on the way. Having only dealt with ISCSI before I was wondering how to best go about provisioning the volumes.

For ISCSI, I tend to create 300 - 500 GB volumes and I seperate OS disks from data disks. I also tend to seperate development from production.

I try to stick to 10 VM per volume as well.

How do we go about these things when NFS? Do I stick to same volume sizes and seperation rules?

What about de-dupe, should we use it?

Cheers

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bulletprooffool
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The is a whitepaper for this:

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vmware_netapp_consolidation_wp7018.pdf

One day I will virtualise myself . . .

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vmroyale
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Hello.

When I set up NFS volumes, I size them up much larger than a typical VMFS volume. The version of ONTAP I was using last had a de-dupe 2 TB limit for the volume size, so that is one thing to keep in mind if you plan to use de-dupe with it as well. Make sure to understand the limitations in your specific version of ONTAP, before you make the volumes too large and find out it won't work.

If you have tiered storage, then the separation of dev and production might still make a lot of sense. If its just one big pool of disk, then just remember the size limitations for the de-dupe and move forward. NetApp's forums are really great too, if you can't find all the answers here.

Good Luck!

Brian Atkinson | vExpert | VMTN Moderator | Author of "VCP5-DCV VMware Certified Professional-Data Center Virtualization on vSphere 5.5 Study Guide: VCP-550" | @vmroyale | http://vmroyale.com
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mlubinski
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I had the same worry. Finally I got answer from NetApp, that while using NFS, you can go with 2-3TB of NFS shares, but should keep max of 250 vmdk files per each NFS share. This is also covered in http://media.netapp.com/documents/tr-3749.pdf.

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bulletprooffool
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The is a whitepaper for this:

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vmware_netapp_consolidation_wp7018.pdf

One day I will virtualise myself . . .
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savantsingh
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Go through the whitepaper first. You have to keep a lot of things in mind before using dedup.

Netapp recomends a lot of best practises which do workout pretty well, but it will all depend on your network setup.

Hope this helps!!

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