A “Multivendor Post” to help our mutual NFS customers using VMware

One of the most talked about blog topics ever on iSCSI or even storage in general most definitely is the “Multivendor iSCSI” post by Vaugn Stewart, Chad Sakac and others. Although some of the information in the Multivendor iSCSI post also applies to NFS there was still a lot unaddressed. This is one of the reasons why Vaughn and Chad decided to collaborate again, and I am glad they did. The follow up post is of an extremely high quality again and is a must read for everyone who has NFS based storage or is interested in virtual environments and storage in general.

I did not quote the full article because I think you should all head over to either Chad's or Vaughn's blog and read the article there. Don't forget to leave a comment or drop a question!

Source: Virtual Geek (Chad Sakac) | Virtual Storage Guy (Vaughn Stewart)

We were quite a bit surprised to see how popular our “Multivendor iSCSI” post
was. The feedback was overwhelming and very supportive of industry
leaders partnering to ensure customer’s success with VMware. While
writing that post, we (Vaughn Stewart from NetApp and Chad Sakac from
EMC) discussed following up the iSCSI post with one focused on
deploying VMware over NFS. The most difficult part around creating this
post is that we couldn’t do it with our iSCSI-focused colleagues.

Since
the original post, we’ve been busy assisting our customers and
partners. We apologize for the delay, so without further ado we present
to you the followup: a “Multivendor NFS” post for our joint customers.
One of the goals of this post is to dispel the FUD customers often hear
around NFS. Heck, if EMC and NetApp can agree – then you KNOW this post
is FUD-Free!

We would like to thank Stu Baker and Satyam Vaghani from VMware,
along with numerous folks at EMC and NetApp for their input on this
post.

While any NFSv3 server will work with VMware, and there
are many NFS servers on the ESX HCL, there is a significant difference
between what one can do with an enterprise class NFS storage array from
EMC or NetApp. The reality is only NetApp and EMC are supporting NFS
deployments with VMware in significant volume.

Both of us
personally are big supporters of NFS for VMware – but if you look at
our post histories – we’re both also rational and try our best (we’re
human, so sometimes we fail) to be balanced and neutral). We try to be good pragmatic voices, so our goal here is pragmatism and facts to help our mutual customers.

For more – go to either one of the source articles…