You might want to look a bit more closely at the network design of you ESX hosts, if you want to go down the NFS or ISCSI route. And from the explanation you have given of your networking, I would say it is most likely to be the cause of the problem
Where ever you use a VMkernel port for storage it is always a good idea to put a Service console port with it, for some reason it always seems to work better.
The best practise I got from VMware regards ISCSI should stand with NFS as well. We do however have 6 Nics in each of our ESX hosts.
Vswitch0 (Service console and VMkernel for Vmotion) with 2 Physical Nics, load balance using Virtual port ID
Vswitch1 (VM Network) with 2 Physical Nics, load balance using Virtual port ID
Vswitch2 (Service console and VMkernel for ISCS/NFS) with 2 Physical Nics, load balance using IP HASH
Now with 4 Nics becomes difficult, as I have yet to find any best practise information based on ISCSI or NFS, but based on some documents I have from the TSX event earlier this year I will make a stab.
Vswitch0 2 Physical Nics with Trunking Configured with 2 Vlans and with the following
(Service console and VMkernel for Vmotion (Seperate Vlan prefer Nic 1)) (Service console and VMkernel for Iscsi/NFS (separate Vlan, prefer Nic 2))
Vswitch1 (VM Network) with 2 Physical Nics, load balance using Virtual port ID
Hope this helps.
I will also send you the document I have directly. If anyone else would like it, let me know off list I will happily send it over
Cheers
Matt
-----Original Message----- From: owner-toasters@mathworks.com [mailto:owner-toasters@mathworks.com] On Behalf Of Jack Lyons Sent: 20 July 2007 04:03 To: Nils Vogels Cc: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: Re: NetApp Thin Provisioning and VMware ESX
I can ping the filer from the esx host and vice versa, but I have 4 interfaces on my esx servers, which one needs to resolve
1 for vmotion 1 for service console <---- I believe this is the network that the NFS traffic will be using??? 1 for production network 1 for dmz network
which leads me to more questions 1) i will be needing to connect to separate test network, user acceptance network and possibly one more. in addition to the ones above. Any problems I need to worry about for having 6-7 network interfaces. 2) Right now, I have all VM's datastores on SAN via FC HBAs. If I max out a server (30-35 VM's per host), will I need more than 1 GigE for NFS
traffic if I move all VM datastores to NFS?
Thanks
Nils Vogels wrote:
Check your DNS / name resolving settings. 90% of the time, that's where your problem lies :-)
On 7/19/07, Jack Lyons jack1729@gmail.com wrote:
I am new to using esx on nfs. I have create an nfs export but when I try to mount it from the esx box, it is really slow - it takes 2- 3 minutes to mount?
I assume that isn't normal, but I am not sure where to start looking
for
problems. I assume it is probably doing something and then waits
until
a timeout occurs before proceeding with the mount. I can nfs mount
the
same filer / export on another box no problem (i.e. quickly)
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