Setup:
- 1 ESXi Server with 12 NIC's
- 1 Virtual Vcenter on ESXi Server
- 1 Windows 2012 Server with NFS and 4 NIC's (VM Storage)
To-do:
- Connect 3 NIC's without a switch and team them
I set up an ESXi 5.5 and an separate Windows Server 2012 with NFS. Then I activated teaming on the WS2012 and in vSphere i added a Virtual Switch with Route based on IP hash teaming and a VMkernel adapter with the 3 desired NIC's . After that i added the NFS share in Vcenter and began to move couple the vm's to the storage. It worked for about an month and now I am expecting heavy issues.
Setup:
- 1x fileserver in an VM on the storage machine (sto1) (Win2008R2)
- 1x fileserver in an VM on the ESXi machine (sto2) (Win2008R2)
- 2x TestPC (Win7x64)
If ONLY TestPC1 connects to sto1 or sto2 and tries to get a testfile (1GB) it works fine but if TestPC2 ALSO connects to the same server and tries to get a testfile (same or another) the NIC's on both TestPC's stopping to work after 3-5 seconds with about 200MB transferred (no ping or even connection anywhere). If one PC closes the file-transfer (~30sec to wait for that if explorer.exe does not crash) the other PC receives the file with a normal transfer speed.
Done:
- Deactivate teaming and only use 1 NIC -same
- Use sto2 (no connection to the VMstorage) -same
How can i fix this strange behavior?
Best Answer
I would recommend dropping either the Windows NFS server or the ESXi hosts.
Windows NFS support is mediocre at best. It shouldn't be used as backing storage for ESXi. If you have your heart set on VMware hypervisors and you want file-based storage, I'd recommend switching to Linux on the storage end.
You can use SMB3 to provide storage to Hyper-V from Windows file servers as of Server 2012, so this is a legitimate option that performs well and has some advantages over NFS+ESXi, like support for SMB multichannel without having to configure LACP or etherchannel like you would for NFS.