For more details on NFS storage options and setup, consult the best practices for VMware provided by your storage vendor.
It also examines the myths that exist and will attempt to dispel confusion as to when NFS should and should not be used with vSphere. This paper provides an overview of the considerations and best practices for deployment of VMware vSphere on NFS based storage. VMware offers support for almost all features and functions on NFS-as it does for vSphere on SAN. The capabilities of VMware vSphere™ on NFS are very similar to the VMware vSphere™ on block-based storage. Running vSphere on NFS is a very viable option for many virtualization deployments as it offers strong performance and stability if configured correctly. The significant presence of Network Filesystem Storage (NFS) in the datacenter today has lead to many people deploying virtualization environments with Network Attached Storage (NAS) shared storage resources.įor the purpose of clarity, both NFS and NAS refer to the same type of storage protocol and the terms will be used interchangeably throughout this paper. This section briefly covers how NFS and NAS have affected the virtualization environment, and why running vSphere on NFS is a very viable option for many virtualization deployments. Recommended number of VMs per NFS datastore.Site Recovery Manager/vSphere Replication.Maximum Number of NFS Mounts per ESXi host.Throughput Options with NFS version 4.1.Overview of the Steps to Provision NFS Datastores.
I was curious as to whether this poor network performance issue had been alleviated in this or one of the updates and would enable me to go back to the native driver, I re-enabled the native driver using the commands: esxcli system module set -enabled=true -module=ne1000Īfter this final reboot, I confirmed ESXi was once again using the native ne1000 driver again and the performance was fine.Best Practices For Running NFS with VMware vSphere
My build number prior to the update was 13006603.Īfter the update, it has changed to 13981272.
I then applied it using the commands: esxcli software vib install -d /vmfs/volumes/SSD/ISOs/ESXi670-201906002.zip
Since I’m only using the free license and I don’t have vSphere Update Manager, I took this opportunity to upload the latest ESXi update to the datastore.
Reattempting the ISO upload again, the progress bar rapidly changed to 100% and throughput on the onboard NIC was as it should have been. I enabled SSH and ran the following commands: esxcli system module set -enabled=false -module=ne1000Īfter the system had finished rebooting, I could see the legacy ‘VMKLinux’ e1000e driver was loaded instead. This was confirmed by checking the vmnic0 within ESXi.
The following link told me that this NIC was supported as used the new ne1000 driver. I reviewed the various information reported by ESXi, which told me the onboard NIC was an Intel I217-LM.
A few searches lead me to this VMware KB: Troubleshooting native drivers in ESXi 5.5 or later (2044993) I moved the connection to the PCIe NIC and the throughtput increased to an expected ~300+ mbps transfer rate to upload the ISOs. I had installed a 4-port gigabit PCIe Intel NIC (HP NC365T) into this machine – intending to bind VMs to this NIC and use the onboard NIC for management only. Trying to use SCP showed file transfer rates of only around 200 kbps with timeouts and estimates of hours to complete. The progress indicator wouldn’t move from 0% even after several minutes and the ISO files were under 1GB in size. After a fairly seamless install process, I went to upload the ISO files to the datastore in preparation for VM creation. I decided to try out VMware ESXi 6.7 on it for comparison. I have an HP EliteDesk 800 G1 SFF machine that I had been running Hyper-V Server 2019 on.