NFS as VM - What are the best configurations?

[lamw]

I've seen this question posed many times in the forum about the speeds user's are getting when running an NFS Server as a Virtual Machine and the different ways to possible optimize for the the best performance. I'm also interested myself to see what the community has found as the best configuration for running an NFS Server as a Virtual Machine? What are the best practices or things to watch out for?

I think this might be a useful topic, unless someone knows of a document either by VMware or vendor/individual that provides a rough guide on the best approach in setting up a simple/cheap NFS Server as Virtual Machine.

Here are just some open questions/comments, feel free to add-on:

1) Recommendation for running out of the box Virtual Appliance such as OpenFiler or FreeNas? Or stick with specific Distro solution

2) NFS Server on any standard UNIX/Linux distro or specific one?

3) What type of VM configurations (cpu,memory,etc)?

4) What should the NFS export options be? (rw,async,no_wdelay,no_acl,no_subtree_check) ?

5) Supported NFS Version is V3, so NFS Server should only be serving this option out?

6) What speeds can be expected, kind of hard to answer but rough ball parks based on certain config(s)?

7) Which use case are these for (testing ONLY, development, backup, production, SMB/Enterprise) environment?

[DSTAVERT]

SInce one of the criteria here was simple/cheap I will report my experience with a simple 2 drive store bought NAS. I needed one for a special purpose that I could transport but that I could eventually use at home. It took some looking in a local computer store to find a NAS that was capable of doing NFS. I ended up with an Iomega Storcenter device. I needed o connect the NAS to a VMware Server server and transfer a 50 GB VM (only USB 1.1 on the server). NFS is simple to connect in linux since it is a native file sharing tool.

Once transfered to the NAS I was able to carry the NAS (almost in my pocket) back to the office. I mounted the NAS to a test ESXi server with NFS. I mounted the same share as a samba share to an XP machine and convert the VM to ESXi. The Iomega NAS with 2 500GB drives as a single 1TB volume transfers at about 20GB per hour. As for cheap, it was about $275. It worked really well for the purpose intended and will be a nice device to have at home.

[DSTAVERT]

Next cheap. I had an HP DL380 G3 retired from service sitting on the shelf (although they run ESX 3i quite nicely). I thought I had 15K SCSI drives in it but not. Only 10K and the built in controller so I don't even remember if is 320. I installed 4 - 146GB drives as RAID 5. The drives were new but older somewhere under $200 each. The DL380's can be had for a couple hunderd dollars with several GB RAM / DUAL XEON processors and dual REAL server GB NICs. Centos 5.2 and NFS.

exports file:

/backup 192.168.200.0/255.255.255.0(rw,secure,root_squash,no_wdelay,async)

I have a seperate (less than $100 16 port) switch dedicated to NFS and seperate subnet. No jumbo frames and probably would have trouble with two simultaneous backups

The script completes an 8GB backup in less than 5 minutes.

[DSTAVERT]

Looking at Netapp. Are they cheap??

[DSTAVERT]

I added a SATA II controller to the DL380 and attached an external enclosure with 4 500 GB drives as RAID 5. The same 8GB backup with the script took 17 minutes. More than 3 times longer. This isn't a high performance controller although it is PCI-X so it isn't too bad. I am going to try again with an adaptec PCI-X.

[Cellolein]

Short answer: No

But....they are the best. Really.

In our company we use a NetApp Metro-Cluster since about three years and it runs like hell.

The NetApp NFS for example is the best and most performant i've ever seen and it works very well with VMware also.

Just for example, I know companies that run a "small" Oracle Database which is about 2.5 TB over NFS.

But I did not found out, why backing up my VM's to an NFS share is so extremely slow. When I look at the thread "Free ESXi backup solution for windows" I think it's a problem that occurs to everyone using NFS for backup.

But why do you ask if NetApp is cheap? Are you thinking about it?