NAS volume

[dahem]

Dear All,

Could you please advise me what are the differences between attach NAS volume to ESX host server (V.3.5) and to VMware guest (Windows server 2003) ?

What do you recommend..:?

Thanks,

dahem

[Stisse-SYSteam]

Hi,

Your question does not make sence? Sorry..

Please explain more what you ask.

/Stefan Krantz

[larstr · Accepted solution]

NAS (nfs) can be used as shared storage for hosting virtual machines (disk files, config files and swap files) if you connect it directly to the ESX hosts. This means that if you have several hosts connected to the same shared storage you can also use VMotion to live migrate VMs between the hosts. NFS is often used in test environments, but also on higher end solutions from NetApp recommend you to host your VMs over NFS to take advantage of the other technology that NetApp supports.

If you connect a VM to the NAS it can use it as a file area.

Lars

[dahem]

Many thanks Lars..

If I add NAS storage to ESX host, Can I extend the current storage group ? if not what is the way to extend it.

Thanks,

Dahem

[larstr]

Dahem,

Some of the best advantages by using NFS is that you can extend it's size on the fly and you can also have volumes larger than 2TB. Whether this is possible for you and your solution depends on your storage backend.

For the rest of the setups using FC/iSCSI it's possible to use extents to grow vmfs volumes, but it's not a recommended practise, and one should rather create a new one and copy data over.

Lars