NFS - What is the real story?

[thickclouds]

Who is using NFS for your VM storage? Can you help us all understand it's performance in the real world? Anything you can share woudl be greatly appreciated.

[aguacero]

Performance is severly slow. Definitely not recommeding in hosting your VMs. You can use NFS to store ISO files, etc but nothing else. Just realize that VMware is optimized to use VMFS. NFS is already "formatted" using non-VMFS layout. One of my colleagues was just Cloning a VM (16 GB VM) and it took well over 6 hours (and counting on the last time we spoke last). Just realize this was a test environment.

My recommendation: DON'T DO IT. Go iSCSI if price is a major factor.

[thickclouds]

can you give me some specifics on the environment?

[jeremypage]

Odd, this is not my experience at all, can you give us information about your colleagues infrastructure?

We have a mid sized (about 300 vms) ESX 3.02/3.5 shop with 7 TB on a DS4500 connected to a 4 gig fibre network and another 15 or so on a NetApp 3070 cluster (well IBM rebranded) via NFS and our NFS datastores, although slower when tested with iometer are faster in real work tests. This does not even take the fact that we don't have to touch our VM or SC for backups.

We are done with fibre for VMs and will be growing our NetApp boxes for the forseable future.

[Speedbmp]

I have a DL380 G5 connected to a store vault s500 6tb

before i moved everything over from an older DL380 G5 with local storage i did some tests with the new systems. and i found that installing windows 2003 from an ISO took something like 10 min when storing to a NFS on the store vault. and when i did the same test but used the iSCSI it was 12 min to install windows 2003 from an iso storing to the store vault. so my tests i found that NFS was faster then iSCSI.

when i was all done and ready to move live systems from the old ESX 3.02 to ESX 3.5 i used VC and it moved them quite quick. some of my VM where quite large 100+ gig so. i am quite happy with NFS.

Stephen

[dean_smith · Accepted solution]

I've deployed NFS at a number of locations, all onto Netapp storage. Netapps also do iSCSI and I normally use that for iSCSI targets from within Guest OS ( MS SQL Server or Exchange volumes for example )

Performance is equal to iSCSI with Netapps plus it's much more flexible, due to the nature of the Netapps, than iSCSI. For one a NFS volume on a Netapp can be non-destructively resized whilst online.

It's best, as with iSCSI, to keep the traffic on dedicated interfaces and VLANs

In my opinion NFS is much easier in general to manage but obviously you should check the performance of the actual kit you are planning to use.

http://www.netapp.com/news/techontap/3248.pdf