The Proper Way To Mount NFS Filesystems with EMC Celerra

The Proper Way To Mount NFS Filesystems with EMC Celerra

We are moving our production VMs from iSCSI to NFS data stores in our ESX environment because of replication issues. We found out that to replicate a 1TB Lun with iSCSI, you need to have 4.4x the amount of space. You have to have your 1TB Lun sitting inside a 2.2TB Filesystem (because to replicate an iSCSI Lun it uses 120% overhead), then you also need 2.2TB sitting on the receiving end. We found that to be ridiculous because of how much it costs for a single drive. We are moving towards NFS because to replicate an NFS Filesystem is uses very little overhead. Thus, we are regaining TONS of space. After creating a few NFS Filesystems and running production VMs on them, I think I found the proper way to create the NFS shares.

 To Create the new File System log in to your EMC Celerra Manager

1. Go To 'File Systems'
2. Click New
3. Specify a name and size in MB
4. Wait for it to finish by looking in the 'Task Status' folder 
5. Once that has completed click on the 'NFS Exports' folder
6. Click New
7. Click the drop down box at the top and select your newley create File System
8. Add your VMKernal Hosts that need to access the NFS Share in the 'Root Hosts' box. Servers have to be seperated by a colon : (ie. 192.168.35.1:192.168.35.2:192.168.35.3)
9. Now you have your NFS share created but you aren't done yet, and this is where certain options must be set using command line interface
   1. Use PuTTy and SSH into your Celerra and issues the following commands
   2. server_mount server_2          (This command will show you all the filesystems that are mounted)
   3. server_umount server_2 NAMEOFSHARE         (This command will unmount the NFS share you have created. DO NOT include the /)
   4. server_mount server_2         (This will verify that your newly create NFS Share is unmounted)
   5. server_mount server_2 -option rw,uncached,sync,no_root_squash NAMEOFSHARE /NAMEOFSHARE           (This command remounts the NFS Share using the options rw (read/write), uncached (was told by EMC this improves performance), sync (All File writes must be committed tot he disk before the write request by the client is actually completed), no_root_squash (By Default, the root user [whose UID is 0] is given the least amount of access to an NFS volume. This option turns off this behavior because the VMkernal needs to access the NFS volume using UID 0)
   6. server_mount server_2          (Now you should see your mounted NFS volume with all the options listed)
10. Log in to your Virtual Center
11. Click on an ESX Server and go to Configuration
12. Click on Storage
13. Click on Add Storage
14. Click on Network File System
15. Type in the IP address or DNS name of your Celerra
16. Type in /NAMEOFSHARE
17. Type in the name of what you want to call the share. I stay consistent with my shares so I would usually name it NAMEOFSHARE
18. Click Finish and then you are done. Steps 10-17 must be done on every ESX server that needs access to the NFS share. If you plan on using VMotion and storing virtual machines on NFS shares, you MUST add the share to each ESX server