I'm rebuilding one of my NFS storage units for a VMWare vSphere setup. As a result, the NFS exports' (datastore) paths defined on the ESX hosts are going to change from: /vol1/xxx to /volumes/vol1/xxx. I also may move some from VMDK files from /vol1/xxx to /volumes/vol2/xxx. Is there a quick way via the ESX command line or otherwise to redefine the mount points or paths of existing datastores?
Nfs – VMWare vSphere – Edit NFS datastore settings
nfsvmware-esx
Related Solutions
Change the file encoding to BIG5.
I had the same problem with ANSI encoding. After changing it to BIG5 everything worked.
Don't forget to modify your C:\WINDOWS\msnfs\\.maphost file
The key to a good VMWare storage platform is understanding what kind of load VMWare generates.
- First, since you host a lot of servers, the workload is typically random. There are many IO streams going at the same time, and not many of them can be successfully pre-cached.
- Second, it's variable. During normal operations, you may see 70% random reads, however the instant you decide to move a VM to a new datastore or something, you'll see a massive 60GB sequential write. If you're not careful about architecture, this can cripple your storage's ability to handle normal IO.
- Third, a small portion of your environment will usually generate a large portion of the storage workload.
The best way to approach building storage for a VMWare platform is to start with the fundamentals.
- You need the ability to service a large random read workload, which means smaller faster drives, as well as possibly SSD. Most modern storage systems allow you to move data around automatically depending on how it's accessed. If you are going to use SSD, you want to ensure this is how you use it. It should be there as a way of gradually reducing hot-spots. Whether you use SSD or not, it's beneficial to be able to put all the work across all the drives, so something with a type of storage pooling would be beneficial.
- You need the ability to service intermittent large writes, which doesn't care as much about the spindle speed of the underlying drives, but does care about the controller stack's efficiency and the size of the cache. If you have mirrored caching (which is not optional unless you're willing to go back to backups whenever you have a controller failure), the bandwidth between the two caches used for mirroring will be your bottleneck for large sequential writes, usually. Ensure that whatever you get has a high speed controller (or cluster) interconnect for write caching. Do your best to get a high speed front end network with as many ports as you can get while remaining realistic on price. The key to good front end performance is to put your storage load across as many front end resources as possible.
- You can seriously reduce costs by having a tier for low priority storage, as well as thin provisioning. If your system isn't automatically migrating individual blocks to cheap large/slow drives (like nearline SAS or SATA with 7200 RPM and 2TB+ sizes), try to do it manually. Large slow drives are excellent targets for archives, backups, some file systems, and even servers with low usage.
- Insist that the storage is VAAI integrated so that VMWare can de-allocate unused parts of the VMs as well as the datastores.
Best Answer
The key here was to remove the datastores and recreate them. There were no shortcuts. This was at a time where I was using ESX (versus ESXi), so I used the service console to remap the mounts.