NFS vs iSCSI for virtual machines

[steinooo]

Hi all,

Could anyone advise on the above in laymans terms please?

I heard that it's better to store VMs on NFS rather than iSCSI, but I can't get my head around what the whole thing means, to me I thought NFS was a file system, like the kind you may see on a NAS etc, and iSCSI a transport mechanism to deliver data from the SAN to the server.

I'd appreciate a helping hand please!

 

[steinooo]

It all depends on what version of NFS you want to use; NFSv3 from a good NAS filer to VMWare ESX servers is like shizer off a shovel fast (i know, ive set em up numerous amounts of times).

How would using NFSv3 differ from using the filesystem on a NetApp san, WAFL?

 

[steinooo]

So if I was just to put the VMs on the plain Netapp file system WAFL, and not NFS - do you mean to say that it won't be as fast?

 

[steinooo]

Thanks guys, some good articles to read here.

I see it has some guidelines about LUN best practises in there which I need to read about, that's another concept I don't quite get yet.