EMC & VMware: IP Storage-iSCSI, NFS, or Fibre Channel?

DETAILS, DEMOS, & LINKS BELOW
What is the right protocol for VMware Infrastructure? iSCSI? NFS? Fibre Channel? What if you had the flexibility choose the protocols that you needed ... simultaneous support. Join EMC's Chad Sakac, senior director VMware strategic alliance, as he discusses where each protocol fits and their unique capabilities in the VMware environment.
For more information: Information Infrastructure for VMware - http://www.emc.com/solutions/business-need/virtualizing-information - infrastructure/information-infrastructure-solutions-vmware.htm

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• EMC
• VMware
• iSCSI
• NFS
• Fibre
• Channel
• Chad
• Sakac
• protocol
• flexibility
• whiteboard
• advice
• Virtually
• Perfect

[sakacc]

SheGeek - it's not that simple. NFS is definitely the simplest option to present a datastore to an ESX host (several clicks less in the VMware GUI, no zoning/masking) - but you can't deploy MSCS/WSFC clusters without use of RDMs, no SRM support until later in 2009, and the performance stuff on the internet is only true for small-block IO. There are two TCP sessions per datastore, so scaling up (without 10GbE) means use of many NFS datastores and each will only fill one 1GbE connection. Thanks

[LittleBrotherBlues]

Good job, easy to follow and understand! You also covered some great points for reviewing WMWARE studies.

[pongraphan]

Great job, very informative... I plan to do more research and see where in our environment we can take advantage of this offering.

[sakacc]

Adawen - I tend to agree, and am happy that EMC offers exactly that capability. Your note about Locking/VMFS is unfortuately inaccurate and FUD (propagated with people with an NFS-only agenda as it suits them)

Details are on Virtual Geek

Each protocol has good/bad - choice and flexibility is good, along with technical clarity/accuracy.

[adawen]

It's better that if you got a unified storage which supports both FCP/iSCSI and NFS, so you can provision a NFS datastore for vmdks, and RDMs for these VM running cluster configurations. Running multiple VMs in a single LUN is not a good idea as there are I/O locks on the block side, but NFS don't have this issue.

[sakacc]

BTW - that's coming from an unabashed pro-NFS supporter. In my opinion, having VMFS and NFS datastores (and small number of tactically used RDMs) for VI/vSphere clusters is the most flexible option. It also offers an easy way to get data onto and off your VMware environment, without using SCP tools.

It's a fundamentalist position to say "one way, always, regardless!" - call me a pragmatist!

[SheGeek1024]

FCP is so not the best way to present storage to VMWare! You can get much better performance and manageability with NFS.

[pcaviness]

Putting VMWare and shared storage together really solves some key pain points. Chad does a great job describing this environment.