I was playing around in my lab with NFS datastores today. I wanted to fail-over a replicated NFS datastore without the need to re-register the virtual machines running on them. I had mounted the NFS datastore using the IP address and as that is used to create the UUID it was obvious that it wouldn’t work. I figured there should [...]

I was reading about Storage Filters last week and wanted to do a short write up. I totally forgot about it until I noticed this new KB article. The KB article only discusses the LUN filters though and not the other filters that are available today. Currently 4 filters have been made public: config.vpxd.filter.hostRescanFilter config.vpxd.filter.vmfsFilter config.vpxd.filter.rdmFilter config.vpxd.filter.SameHostAndTransportsFilter The first filter [...]

An often asked question when implementing NFS based storage is what do these advanced settings represent you are recommending me to change? VMware published a great KB article which describes these. For instance: NFS.HeartbeatMaxFailures The number of consecutive heartbeat requests that must fail before the server is marked as unavailable. The KB article does not only explain the separate NFS settings but also [...]

I was doing performance troubleshooting with Frank Denneman this week and we wanted to use “vscsiStats” to verify if there was any significant latency. We checked multiple whitepapers before we went onsite and our primary source was this excellent article by Scott Drummonds. After start vscsiStats and receiving a “successful started”  we waited for 15 minutes and verified if we [...]

About a week ago I wrote about the new version of the NetApp best practices pdf TR-3428. I emailed with Vaughn about the fact that leaving maintenance mode before the reboot might not be the smartest thing to do. Vaughn aggreed and replied that the document would be revised soon. This would need to go through the normal process which [...]

I just noticed that there’s a new version(4.3) of the NetApp on NFS best practices document online. This document has a new best practice in there that I discussed a couple of weeks ago about the “/NFS/LockDisable” and the “prefvmx.consolidateDeleteNFSLocks” settings(Page 14). As far as I can judge at this point in time the document seems to be also following [...]

There has been a lot of discussion(check Scott’s take on this) around this advanced NFS setting called “NFS.LockDisable”. In short, you can disable the locking mechanism on NFS volumes with this setting. In the past NetApp had a best practices document which stated that it should be disabled by setting it to “1″. But, as some noticed this can and probably [...]