If I store my VM on an NFS will I take a huge performance hit?

[danweb]

Hi,

I am just taking my first foray into Virtualisation, and have successfully virtualised a phyiscal Terminal Services Server using ESXi 3.5. It's running a treat and I am really pleased with it. But before I start virtualising more machines, I need to be confident of my backup/restore procedures.

It seems the most simple way would be to store the VMs on an NFS store, then re-import them onto a newly provisioned host, should my current ESXi host fail. I can subsequently create backups of the VMs that are stored on the NFS also.

Does this make sense? Will my terminal services server get noticeable slower if I move the VM to the NFS data store?

[weinstein5]

Welcome to the Forums - It will depend on the NFS datastore you will be using - for example there are many VMware customers using NetApp NFS as their shared

storage with no performance issues

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[danweb]

We are using a Volume that exists on our network that is shared out from an Apple Xserve (OSX 10.5) using NFS. So I guess I may not find the answer unless someone else is in a similar scenario?

If I attempt it myself, I will post back here with results.

[piaroa]

I haven't seen any performance issues with VMs in NFS, and our cluster has over 400 VMs in different filers. Just make sure you use a good filer and at the very least a 1Gbps connection.

Check this performance comparison:

http://media.netapp.com/documents/tr-3808.pdf

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[danweb]

Thanks for the pointers piaroa;

I guess I am gonna have to suck it and see, I suspect that the VM that I am considering moving will take some hit but not too much as I don't think it has a lot of hard disk I/O.

Might make the move tonight.

BTW forgive my newbie ignorance but can you explain "make sure you use a good filer"

[piaroa]

I mean, don't throw a high number of running VMs into a home-office filer (Iomega, netgear, Qnap, etc), running on SATA 7.2kRPM disks.

Maybe I should have said an enterprise grade filer, running at least 10.000K rpm disks for IO intensive VMs.

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