Who's Using NFS for VMWare?

[ianbert]

I just wanted to see who in the area is also using NFS for hosting VM on their production DataStore.

Has anyone out here been hit with the "SplitBrain" condition because they turned off NFS locking?

Look forward to meeting everyone at the next mtg!

Ian, SysAdmin - Arizona Tile

[TomHowarth]

Ian

Welcome to the forums, I have moved your thread into a more appropiate forum area for access to a greater audience.

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Tom Howarth

VMware Communities User Moderator

[PhilipArnason]

I use NFS on Netapp with Vmware. It's 'effn fantastic. Have never experienced the splitbrian condition.

Philip

[azn2kew]

If you have enough bandwidth infrastructure with NetApp appliances, NFS is the way to go and you can get more case studies from NetApp sales engineer anytime or ask their partners to come in and present to you know great NFS work with NetApp gear. I've personally enjoy working with NetApp product on NFS/VMware solutions.

If you found this information useful, please consider awarding points for "Correct" or "Helpful". Thanks!!!

Regards,

Stefan Nguyen

iGeek Systems Inc.

VMware, Citrix, Microsoft Consultant

[terrible_towel]

I use a NetApp for my datastore over NFS also. The flexibility that NFS gives is great.

But I do have an issue with deleting VM snapshots. If I take a VM snapshot, do a datastore based copy, and then delete the VM snapshot -- Sometimes the guest OS hangs while its VM snapshot is being deleted. This is on a fast, lightly loaded NetApp with FC disks. The VM snapshot is only a few mins old, yet it can take upwards of 3 mins to delete. It's during this time that the guest OS hangs. From multiple posts on the forums (see below), it seems like doing this over NFS may be a common link. I have a couple of VM's that will experience this hang everytime. So as an experiment, I moved this VM's datastore to another NetApp using an iSCSI datastore. The snapshot deletes went from 2-3 mins to under 10 seconds.

Should I just accept this as 'NFS is slow compared to iSCSI ' and move on ?

Thanks,

Paul

Other threads about snapshots delete's hanging the guest OSs:

Snapshots take long time to commit -

Snapshots take long time to commit -

Snapshots take long time to commit -

Beware the long snapshot -

[Rockapot]

I have used NFS before on a reasonably well sized production environment with no issue'.

Carl