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)
hello , hi i would like to know what are the different vm and their differences, advantages and also their disadvantages, if possible try to help me…… hope i will get answer for this