STORCENTER IX4-200r NAS WITH VMWARE ESX SERVER 3.5

CREATING AN NFS DATASTORE ON ESX SERVER

VMware Infrastructure 3 management utilities are used to configure and mount NFS shares from the StorCenter ix4- 200r. The VI client is also used to assign a datastore name to the export. The datastore name is the key reference that is used to manage the datastore within the ESX environment.

The NFS datastore is viewed as a pool of storage space to support virtual disks. One or more virtual disks are created within the datastore and assigned to virtual machines. Each virtual machine will use the primary virtual disk to install the guest operating system and boot information. The additional disks are used to support application and user data.

By default, the ESX Server allows a maximum of eight NFS datastores to be created. To create more NFS datastores, please change the NFS.MaxVolumes setting to a number no greater than 32. The following settings are recommended for NFS connections:

NFS.MaxVolumes = 32

NFS.HeartbeatFrequency = 12

NFS.HeartbeatTimeout = 5

NFS.HeartbeatMaxFailures = 10

Net.TcpipHeapSize = 30

The three heartbeat options control heartbeat counts and timeouts. In the event of a brief network connection loss, reboot, or failure of the NFS server, the ESX Server will not simply fail the NFS datastores. The NFS client in ESX relies on heartbeats to verify the NFS shares are available. Therefore, increasing the NFS heartbeat frequency will ensure the NFS datastore I/O can resume much sooner, once the NFS server comes back.

Figure 12 Modify NFS options on ESX Server

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