NFS Reading list for vSphere Users

John Borhek SAN Storage, VMware, VMware ESXi, VMware vSphere June 27, 2019

I have to confess that I have always thought of NFS for vSphere as being a second-tier choice. Even the best solutions from well known vendors using 10GbE and SSD, NFS datastores always seem to under-perform and be more problematic as compared to block-storage SAN devices. Even with the theoretical reduction of overhead per payload (per Ethernet Frame), I’ve never found an enterprise NFS device that I wouldn’t gladly trade for a block-storage SAN when used for vSphere-specific applications.

That being said, NFS is a fine protocol and one occasionally finds enterprise vSphere deployments of some scale which leverage NFS partly or exclusively, so I put together this reading list. There is no one solution, Best Practice, however a better understanding of how vSphere uses NFS never hurts.

Virtual machines residing on NFS storage become unresponsive during a snapshot removal operation (2010953) – VMware KB

Use Network Transport (AKA: NBD) and NOT hot-add on the transport/proxy
Use one transport/proxy VM per ESXi Host and create Host Affinity Rules
Use NFS 4.1

VM Loses Connection During Snapshot Removal – Veeam

Use faster datastore
Create CPU reservation for VM
use workingDir to redirect snapshots to different datastore than the VM datastore
Disable VMware Tools Sync driver

NFS 4.1 Multipathing Configuration and Best Practices – VMware vSphere Central

Use multipatiing with more than one IP on the target SAN
Use IP Hash on vSwitches

NFS Storage Design VMware Docs

NFS cannot be storage load balanced – only network load balanced AKA IP Hash

Best Practices for running VMware vSphere^TM on Network Attached Storage – VMware White Paper

Increase concurrent datastore mounts from 8 to 32
Increase Net.TcpipHeapSize to 30MB
Change timeout settings ESXi
- HeartbeatFrequency = 12
- HeartbeatTimeout = 5
- HeartbeatMaxFailures = 10

NFS Protocols and ESXi – VMware Docs

Converting to 4.1 –first unmount NFS 3 datastore from all hosts to which it is mounted BEFORE mounting it as 4.1
NFS Datastores MUST never be mounted as 3.X and 4.X at the same time due to file locking techniques.

NFS with IP Hash Load Balancing (1006795) VMware KB