When you're an IT guy tinkering is part of your
lifestyle. There has to be at least a
modicum of curiosity about how things work.
We drive department heads crazy because just keeping stuff working isn't
good enough for us. We want that extra
Megabit of throughput or another free Gigabyte out of the SAN.
Sadly, most of us can't afford to set up an server farm in a
spare bedroom just to satisfy our need to tinker; but with virtualization you
can come very close.
That is of course the promise. Being able to harness the same capabilities
of a small enterprise with a lot less hardware is undeniably a good thing. Letting us run wild in our own little
enterprise is even better.
VirtualBox, VMWare Workstation and their kind is fine for
taking a new OS out for a spin but they fall a bit short for giving you real
world skills.
ESXi, however, is another story. Maybe more than any other platform, it's
probably the most useful and relevant virtualization lab platform you can
experiment with. Don't confuse this with
your grandpa's ESXi, though.
Starting with version 5, VMWare decided that ESXi is the one
hypervisor to rule them all instead of just being ESX's little brother. That means anything you do with ESXi
translates to what you can do in the enterprise.
It's one thing to play with virtual servers in VMWare but
it's quite another to play with the platform itself. After
all, the more you tinker with it the better it works right? Well, at least till we blow something up...
So this time around I decided I wasn't satisfied just
locking myself out of the VSphere Client because I forgot the password. I wanted to get some external storage online
but I didn't have a spare ISCSI array laying around. So I
decided to venture into the wonderful world of NFS.
In ESXi you've basically got 2 options for storage.
1. Local - meaning it's either physically attached to the
host or on a dedicated backbone via ISCSI
2. NFS
- Which is pretty much "other"
Local's easy, if your storage controller can see it so can
VMWare. ISCSi adds a wrinkle but so long as your target's
on the network it's not a big deal.
NFS, ah, that's a different story. A lot of Sys Admins can go an entire career
without having to deal with it. Like
SMB, NFS is designed to offer up access to files on a network. Those shares are usually hosted on Unix
servers but unlike SMB, NFS is designed to fool your local PC into thinking a
network resource is local. An impressive
feat compared to the clunky "Map Network Drive" or CLI "Net
Use" commands in Windows.
Ok, so we know what NFS is but why do we care about it for
VMWare? Simple, most NAS storage devices
will have support for the protocol to allow UNIX clients to access their
shares. Set up NFS on your NAS and
you've given ESXi another potential datastore to play with.
NFS has it's quirks but most NAS management interfaces make
it a relatively painless process to set up.
Once that happens just be sure you have a solid network connection
between your virtual host(s) and the NAS.
Follow along with the video as I set up an NFS share for
ESXi 5.5, play with a VM that lives on it and even break it!
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