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prasadsv
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

What is the maximum size of a NFS v3/v41 datasotore in esxi 6.0/6.5

Can someone please help me to figureout what is the maximum size of NFS v3/v41 datastore in esxi 6.0/6.5. Also,what is the max file size that I can create on these datastores.

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aleex42
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I think there is no limit in VMware vSphere for NFS datastores.

You only have the volume and file limit of your storage provider.

For example, with an NetApp FAS8200, you have the following limits:

* 100 TB NFS volume (means VMware Datastore)

* 16 TB maximum File-Size

This means you cannot provision a single VMware disk with more than 16 TB (for real, it must be a bit smaller).

Hope that helps 🙂

Best regards,
Alex

-- Alex (VMware VCAP-DCV, NetApp NCIE, LPIC 2)
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amomtaz
Contributor
Contributor

OS level workarounds

  • Add multiple 15.81TB disks to the OS and configure the OS to use dynamic disks to present them as one big disk. Dynamic disks are generally not recommended on the physical disks as one disk loss could lose you the entire logical disk. However since, the whole thing is virtualized and the underlying storage is already redundant, dynamic disks are ok in this case.
  •  Configure your application to use different folders on different disks if that is supported by the app.
  • Use Symbolic links to trick the application into thinking that all the folders are in on path while the actual data would be on another disk.

Storage Level Workarounds

  • Use vSAN (vSAN have 62TB max single file size)
  • Use iSCSI storage instead of NFS as your datastore. iSCSI is block storage so it does not have the limitation of a max file size as the data is written in blocks. If there is a max Datastore size from the storage vendor, and you need a VM with more than that size, you can configure multiple datastores and create a logical datastore that is comprised of multiple LUNs. Do note that this comes with some additional risk as if one lun has an issue, the whole datastore may be lost.
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