You can use the New Datastore wizard to mount an NFS volume.

Prerequisites

  • Set up NFS storage environment.
  • If you plan to use Kerberos authentication with the NFS 4.1 datastore, make sure to configure the ESXi hosts for Kerberos authentication.

Procedure

  1. In the vSphere Client object navigator, browse to a host, a cluster, or a data center.
  2. From the right-click menu, select Storage > New Datastore.
  3. Select NFS as the datastore type and specify an NFS version.
    • NFS 3
    • NFS 4.1
    Important: If multiple hosts access the same datastore, you must use the same protocol on all hosts.
  4. Enter the datastore parameters.
    Option Description
    Datastore name The system enforces an 80 character limit for the datastore name.
    Folder The mount point folder name
    Server The server name or IP address. You can use IPv6 or IPv4 formats.

    With NFS 4.1, you can add multiple IP addresses or server names if the NFS server supports trunking. The ESXi host uses these values to achieve multipathing to the NFS server mount point.

  5. Select Mount NFS read only if the volume is exported as read-only by the NFS server.
  6. To use Kerberos security with NFS 4.1, enable Kerberos and select an appropriate Kerberos model.
    Option Description
    Use Kerberos for authentication only (krb5) Supports identity verification
    Use Kerberos for authentication and data integrity (krb5i) In addition to identity verification, provides data integrity services. These services help to protect the NFS traffic from tampering by checking data packets for any potential modifications.
    If you do not enable Kerberos, the datastore uses the default AUTH_SYS security.
  7. If you are creating a datastore at the data center or cluster level, select hosts that mount the datastore.
  8. Review the configuration options and click Finish.