NFS or FC to connect vmware ESX Farms

Question

Hello

We are using EMC products today in our environment (Clariion, Celerra) and until now used FC for connecting our vmware hosts

Now we are going to upgrade our EMC product and I am trying to understand what is the best to connect our vmware host with in the future...

What are EMC thinking about this and how to connect vmware hosts in the fuuture...?

Any input on this woul'd be great!

I know it dempends alot on the existing environment and applikations and so on....but it woul'd be interesting to hear your inputs on this.

There is a lot going on to integrate celerra to vmware...is it the way EMC is going ??

/Regards Per

bwolfeld · Answer

Hi Per,

EMC's position on protocols for VMware is neutral. We believe that both block (iSCSI, FC) and file (NFS) protocols will delivery similar performance and thus the choice should be based on your application requirements are the type of storage infrastructure you need to support. Some customers prefer the benefits of an IP based storage infrastructure while others want to leverage their SAN. EMC is continuing to invest in both block and file based protocols for VMware. For a further discussion on VMware on NFS, check out Chad Sakac's Blog posting on NFS referenced below. It is actually written by Chad and folks from other storage vendors. It is a great discussion and provides an unbiased view of the pros and cons of VMware over NFS.

Speaking of being biased, I am the Solution Manager for VMware on Celerra and freely admit that I am biased towards NFS for VMware. Last month we released a very cool plug-in that simplifies storage management for VMware admins. The plug-in allows you to provision NFS Datastores direct from vCenter. We also take advantage of vStorage APIs to clone VMs about 2X faster than native VMware cloning. The Plug-in supports "Fast Clones" which are SNAP copies of VMs. You can stand up new VM's in seconds and they are extremely space efficient. We also use a enhanced dedupe functionality to compress VMs, saving 30-50% of storage space.

Finally, we just published an updated copy of the Celerra Techbook for VMware. This is a very detailed document that describes how to setup and configure Celerra for use in VMware environments.

I hope this information is helpful!

Best regards,

Bruce

---------------

Powerlink:

EMC Celerra Techbook on Powerlink:

Home > Products > Hardware/Platforms > Celerra Family > TechBooks

EMC Celerra Plug-in for VMware (zip file):

Home > Support > Software Downloads and Licensing > Downloads A-B > Adapters for Third-Party Applications

Chad's Blog:

Tech Book: http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2010/04/new-celerra-vsphere-techbook.html

VMware on NFS: http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2009/06/a-multivendor-post-to-help-our-mutual-nfs-customers-using-vmware.html

WVDave · Answer

Hello Per,

We are using Celerras for our virtual enviroment. We are currently using iSCSI to store our vmdks. Performance has been very good.

I am running Windows based application servers, file servers, domain controllers, Exchange, and SQL in this environment.

We are looking at upgrading our Celerras and moving to NFS. As we add more and more applications to our SQL enviroment, I am trying to stay ahead of the demand an looking for any ways I can to optimize the enviroment with the tools I have in place.

I think NFS is worth investigating.

Best wishes.

Dave

VMware

NFS or FC to connect vmware ESX Farms

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