ISO best practice

[hasole]

Is it best practice to use a NFS server to store your iso's. i.e. Services for Unix (although this would consume a windows license)

or is it better to just mount a smbfs straight off the ESX server.

Cheers

[esiebert7625]

Both ways work about the same, just a matter of preference. The NFS is a little easier because you can create a network attached storage volume in ESX that all the servers can see. Using SMB you have to configure it to mount each time through the Service Console.

I have both methods documented on my website. Alternately you can just create an ISO directory on your VMFS volume and store them there.

http://vmware-land.com/Vmware_Tips.html#ESX5

http://vmware-land.com/Vmware_Tips.html#ESX8

Fyi…if you find this post helpful, please award points using the Helpful/Correct buttons.

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Thanks, Eric

Visit my website: http://vmware-land.com

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[Texiwill]

Hello,

While both methods work, one has a security implication....

SMB/CIFS is notoriously insecure. As is NFS but for different reasons. I would not use SMB/CIFS or NFS from the service console as a directory traversal hack can possibly (and again this depends on quite a bit) see what is living inside your /vmfs partition and therefore gain information about which servers are virtualized, etc.

NFS has different issues as everything is cleartext and suffers from a man in the middle attack.

I put my ISOs on /vmimages or on a VMFS and all is fine. I am loath to open up more on ESX than absolutely necessary.

Best regards,

Edward

[petedr]

Agree with what you are saying, we also put isos on /vmimages

[Texiwill]

Hello,

If I do use NFS to share my ISOs, I put them on a separate NFS ONLY network where no machines live and mount it using a vmkernel device to the ESX server cluster. I never mount anything on the SC if I can help it.

Best regards,

Edward

[ejward]

I've got mine on a VMFS volume on our SAN. This way we've got easy access to them from existing hosts or any we add. If we start to run out of SAN space, then I'll look into relocating them. We decided against having them locally on each host because there would have to be duplicate files living everywhere. If a new ISO comes out for something, we've got to copy it to 6 different places.