Paul Manning, from VMware, in response to a question I asked in the VI:OPS forums:
The current best practice for NFS is to not seperate the VM swap space from the VMhome directory on a NFS datastore. The reason for the originial recommendation was just good old fashioned conservitiveness.
More at the forum post, including more on [...]
With surprisingly little buzz (outside of sun.com) - must be that darned economy - Sun launched its new Fishworks product line yesterday: Three hardware products, several of them with flash drives, and an impressive looking user interface, which appears at first glace to surpass anything NetApp offers. Here’s a quick rundown of features from [...]
Scott Lowe recently linked to a VMware KB article entitled Storing swap files on VMFS when running virtual machines from NFS. The article (from 3/31/2008) is perhaps the latest word from VMware in the frustrating back-and-forth on whether placing an ESX VM’s swap on NFS is acceptable or not.
Performance Report: Multiprotocol Performance Test of VMware® ESX 3.5 on NetApp Storage Systems: A complementary whitepaper to VMware’s own work comparing Fibre Channel, iSCSI and NFS as storage protocols for VMware ESX. (Seen at blog.scottlowe.org.)
File Level Recovery from within a VMDK backup - Nick Triantos of NetApp covers file-level recovery from VMware (Windows) VMDK files again, in more depth than he has before. Nick notes that it can be a “a point-and-click process.”
VMware has just released a paper entitled Comparison of Storage Protocol Performance (seen at Scale the Mind and blog.scottlowe.org); maybe this will help deflate some of the too-often repeated speculation that NFS is too slow for VMware ESX.