| Looking to run NFS and VMFS ESX data stores on a single ESX host. | | Anybody else doing it? | | Gotchas?
We do it (total of 15 or so ESX hosts, 4 filers), though most of our ESX datastores are VMFS on LUNs from the filers. Works just as expected.
I haven't looked closely at relative performance, but we have a number of low use VMs where disk performance is almost irrelevant, and tend to put them on NFS datastores.
I like using NFS datastores: - snapshots let us mount old .vmdk files for "easy" file restores - doing it with a lun seems more of a pain - easy to adjust the size of a datastore on the filer - easier to create a machine - we lean towards LUN per VM, which means creating a new VM is more annoying
One inconvenience of NFS datastores is that they need to be added separately on each ESX host. I don't know if adding a datastore can be done from the service console shell, but we use the VI client, which is tedious. With LUNs, we configure them once on the filer, and then our ESX rescan scripts result in the storage being visible everywhere.
Hope that helps - cheers!
John