Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
storage vendors recommend an important series of advanced ESXi parameter settings to
maximize performance (including increasing memory assigned to the networking stack
and changing other characteristics). Be sure to refer to your storage vendor's recommen-
dations for using its product with vSphere.
3.
You created a i le system on your NAS device and exported it via NFS. A key part of this
coni guration is the specii cs of the NFS export itself; the ESXi NFS client must have full
root access to the NFS export. If the NFS export was exported with root squash, the i le
system will not be able to mount on the ESXi host. (Root users are downgraded to unpriv-
ileged i le system access. On a traditional Linux system, when root squash is coni gured
on the export, the remote systems are mapped to the “nobody” account.) You have one of
two options for NFS exports that are going to be used with ESXi hosts:
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Use the no_root_squash option, and give the ESXi hosts explicit read/write access.
Add the ESXi host's IP addresses as root-privileged hosts on the NFS server.
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For more information on setting up the VMkernel networking for NFS trafi c, refer to
Chapter 5; for more information on setting up your NFS export, refer to your storage vendor's
documentation.
After you complete these steps, you're ready to mount an NFS datastore.
Perform the following steps to mount an NFS datastore on an ESXi host:
1.
Make a note of the IP address on which the NFS export is hosted as well as the name (and
full path) of the NFS export; you'll need this information later in this process.
2.
Launch the vSphere Web Client and connect to an ESXi host or to a vCenter Server
instance.
3.
In the vSphere Web Client, navigate to the Storage view.
➢
4.
Right-click the datacenter object and select All vCenter Actions
New Datastore. This
launches the New Datastore Wizard.
5.
At the Storage Type screen, select Network File System. Click Next.
6.
At the Name And Coni guration screen, you'll need to supply three pieces of information:
◆
First, you'll need to supply a datastore name. As with VMFS datastores, we recom-
mend a naming scheme that identii es the NFS server and other pertinent informa-
tion for easier troubleshooting.
You'll need to supply the IP address on which the NFS export is hosted. If you don't
know this information, you'll need to go back to your storage array and determine
what IP address it is using to host the NFS export. In general, identifying the NFS
server by IP addresses is recommended, but it is not recommended to use a hostname
because it places an unnecessary dependency on DNS and because generally it is
being specii ed on a relatively small number of hosts. There are, of course, some cases
where a hostname may be applicable—for example, where NAS virtualization tech-
niques are used to provide transparent i le mobility between NFS servers—but this
is relatively rare. Also, refer to the sidebar titled “There's Always an Exception to the
Rule”; that sidebar describes another coni guration in which you might want to use a
hostname that resolves to multiple IP addresses.
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