NFS Datastore Know How

[Vfreak07]

Hello People,

In my VSphere environment I have an NFS datastore of size 5.7 TB attached to one of the Hosts. As per VMware documentation the maximum size of Datastore formatted with VMFS-3 partition is 2 TB-512 Bytes. (As mentioned in Config Maximums)

They is no clear Information about NFS datastore in the documents. I did check with one of the VMware engineers and he said you CAN have large datastores but there will be performance issues.

Can anyone tell me what will be its implication on my environment and what kind of performance issues I might face in future. Has anyone faced similar issues in their environment?

I appreciate you help!!

[vmroyale]

Hello.

Note: This discussion was moved from the Virtualization Technology & Industry community to the VMware vSphere™ Storage community.

I think the limit is determined by the vendor, but it seems to be 16TB for most. Keep in mind, a single VMDK is still limited to 2TB-512bytes though.

Good Luck!

[ldelloca]

The notion of a 16TB NFS datastore limitation is nothing to do with VMware; it’s the typical file system size limit for most NFS storage systems. When the NFS storage system has this limit, then so too do the NFS datastores. NFS file systems up to 256TB are available with a global name space that provide up to a 4PB name space. This means a datastore can grow up to 4PB or 256 times larger than a 16TB datastore.

Anyway, cuncurrent file access for read/write can severely impact performance of the underlying storage system, if not properly sized.

Regards,

Luca.

--

Luca Dell'Oca

http://www.vuemuer.it

@dellock6

vExpert 2011

[VasooV]

I recently performed some tuning on NFS. Hope it helps.

Tuning RedHat Centos Linux NFS for VMWare ESXi Datastore Performance

http://veerapen.blogspot.com/2011/09/tuning-redhat-enterprise-linux-rhel-54.html