Comments on: Republished: Dispelling Some VMware over NFS Myths

By: Cliff

Cliff — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 01:51:51 +0000

This article states that the “Think - to - thick” issue is fixed in vpshere 4, yet when I download a VM from the datastore to my PC, it still expands. Is there a patch or update I’m missing? I am running esxi4.

By: Slav Pidgorny

Slav Pidgorny — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 08:31:06 +0000

There is another reason why I prefer NFS over FC: Fibre channel analysers are expensive equipment while IP and Ethernet analysis tools are readily available on you platform of choice. I have seen situations with both NAS and SAN when performance was suboptimal, and figuring out what’s wrong is much more complicated with FC SAN. So is replacing parts of the storage infrastructure.

By: Philip Arnason

Philip Arnason — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 16:27:35 +0000

With the advent of 10GB ethernet, performance CAN be better than fiber channel. We are running 10GB and have all our datastores on NFS and loving it.

By: Peter

Peter — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 15:14:08 +0000

NetApp also have a very nice utility called RCU (Rapid Clone Utility) which utilises Flex Clone on NetApp which keeps clones small. It integrates in VC as well. Details here http://now.netapp.com/NOW/download/software/rapid_cloning/2.0.1/ if you have a NOW login.

By: slowe

slowe — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 03:47:32 +0000

VMDKs do start out thin, but quickly grow thick. I discussed this in a post on my site some time ago. And, based on my experience, this behavior is corrected in VMware vSphere 4.

By: wer

wer — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 03:11:18 +0000

Don’t forget that in ESX versions before vSphere - there is no such thing as “thin provisioned” on NFS, contrary to VMware’s documentation. VMware support indicated that this will be fixed in version 4 (vSphere).

Upside to this if you are running NFS you should be using NetApp, and can then use dedupe, but still doesn’t help that creating thousands of VM’s and templates in the initial deployment of large ESX clusters over NFS can be a pain without thin provisioning.

By: Andrew Miller

Andrew Miller — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 06:27:39 +0000

Any word on a timeline for said SRM release?

By: slowe

slowe — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 12:04:16 +0000

Brian, you are correct–NFS is not yet supported on SRM. The next major SRM release is slated to include NFS support.

By: Brian Norris

Brian Norris — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 09:07:36 +0000

Hi Scott, Great article. I agree, the NFS vs FC vs iSCSI question comes up alot, but more often its NFS vs iSCSI. Ill be honest and say im bias and tend to lean towards iSCSI, not because I think iSCSI is better but mainly because its what I know, and most important if you look back over the last few years Im pretty sure VCB, Storage Vmotion, SRM were all supported on iSCSI before NFS, in fact I must go have a look at the support matrix to see if NFS is supported yet, but I suspect not till the next release of SRM.

By: Ken Carlile

Ken Carlile — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 15:13:56 +0000

I’m curious about your feelings on iSCSI. I’ve already committed to it (in a very small environment), but it would be nice to know if I’ve chosen wrong.