| 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 annoyingOne thing to remember is dedupe.
Don't forget dedupe.
Using thin provisioned luns with dedupe returns space to the netapp volume but not the datastore. You can use the free space to create new LUNs for use as new datastores (or use extents) but the VMware datastore does not see the free space.
With NFS, deduped blocks are visible at the datastore level as free space.
I've not heard of an interoperability issues when running both LUN and NFS datastores on the same host. Just make sure that you have a robust IP storage network IE plenty of NICs, etherchannels, VIFs, etc.
-Tim-