For some reason, it seems that most VMware users shrug NFS off as only being good enough to store ISO files. Many wouldn’t dare run production (or in some cases, even development) environments on anything other than FC or iSCSI. Unfortunately, I feel that many are missing out.

Coming out of VMworld 2007, there is some good buzz around the use of VMware with NFS. There are a couple of blog posts floating around about the subject. I highly recommend you checkout one of them in particular by Nick Triantos (here). Nick, who is an engineer over at Netapp, provides a very good overview of some advantages of using NFS with VMware.

Another very good resource is a session from VMworld 2007. The session was led by two engineers from Netapp (Peter Learmonth and Kim Weller) and Bud James from BEA Systems. You can find the presentation files here and my earlier coverage of this session here. It was somewhat comical during this session. I could almost hear FCP/iSCSI users’ jaws hitting the floor during some of the slides of this presentation (including the guy sitting behind me who couldn’t believe the performance metrics that were presented).

I have personally used NFS with VMware in a couple of different scenarios and have had nothing but great experiences with it.

Armed with these great resources, hopefully users will take NFS more seriously when planning the storage for their VMware environments. I would love to hear from anyone who is currently using NFS in their environment and their take on it.