VMFS vs. NFS for VMware Infrastructure? | VMware Storage Blog
Good answer to a frequently asked question on the new VMware Storage Blog. Click through for a nice quick read.
Link: VMware: VMware Storage Blog: VMFS vs. NFS for VMware Infrastructure?.
The dynamic, flexible environment that we call VMware Infrastructure requires shared, coordinated storage between ESX servers. There are two families of storage technologies that can meet this requirement today, SAN-based block storage (e.g. Fibrechannel or iSCSI) and NAS. VMware supports both forms of storage access for our customers. ...
So which to use? The first criteria is to continue to use the type of storage infrastructure you are familiar with. If your organization uses block based storage – use VMFS. If NAS is in use, it may make more sense to deploy VMware Infrastructure with NFS. Other aspects of storage management, such as the basic virtualization of storage on behalf of the VM or the internal structure of the virtual disk files (VMDK) are handled independently of this choice. You get the same high level VI functionality regardless.
For new deployments, there are the traditional storage tradeoffs. ...
I have done some basic testing with VMWare ESX 3.5 and a Linux NFS server (GB Enet, 15K RPM drives) and was surprised by the decent performance. I only had 2 VM's running of NFS, rest ran off the actual server based VMFS. My VM is an app server. I put the virtual machine and drive on the NFS data store. The VM interacts with db server running on physical hardware. I will be using NFS for some VM deployment as well as for devetest and possibly for DR given the flexibility of NFS (and lack of budget to purchase iScsi SAN)
Posted by: Lou | September 29, 2008 at 05:30 AM