Capabilities Supported by NFS/NAS

An NFS client built into the ESXi hypervisor uses the Network File System (NFS) protocol over TCP/IP to access a designated NFS volume that is located on a NAS server. The ESXi host can mount the volume and use it for its storage needs.

vSphere supports versions 3 and 4.1 of the NFS protocol.

Typically, the NFS volume or directory is created by a storage administrator and is exported from the NFS server. The NFS volume does not need to be formatted with a local file system, such as VMFS. You can mount the volume directly on ESXi hosts, and use it to store and boot virtual machines in the same way that you use VMFS datastores.

In addition to storing virtual disks on NFS datastores, you can also use NFS as a central repository for ISO images, virtual machine templates, and so on. If you use the datastore for ISO images, you can connect the virtual machine's CD-ROM device to an ISO file on the datastore and install a guest operating system from the ISO file.

ESXi hosts support the following shared storage capabilities on NFS volumes.

• VMware vMotion and Storage vMotion
• High Availability (HA), Fault Tolerance, and Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS)
• ISO images, which are presented as CD-ROMs to virtual machines
• Virtual machine snapshots
• Host profiles
• Virtual machines with large capacity virtual disks, or disks greater than 2 TB. Virtual disks created on NFS datastores are thin-provisioned by default, unless you use hardware acceleration that supports the Reserve Space operation. See Hardware Acceleration on NAS Devices in the vSphere Storage documentation.

In addition to storing virtual disks on NFS datastores, you can also use NFS as a central repository for ISO images, virtual machine templates, and so on.

To use NFS as a shared repository, you create a directory on the NFS server and then mount the directory as a datastore on all hosts. If you use the datastore for ISO images, you can connect the virtual machine's CD-ROM device to an ISO file on the datastore and install a guest operating system from the ISO file.